Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (27 page)

So by 1913, no company in the United States had made the attempt to sell flood insurance again, and the only business in the world selling flood insurance was the Swiss National Insurance Company in Basel, Switzerland. Nobody in America would try again until the 1920s. The basic problem, as insurance carriers saw it, was that there were too few consumers interested in flood insurance. The only ones who bought it were those who knew that there was a good chance their home might be flooded, and then of course the insurance companies did not want to sell to them. Someone miles away from a river or creek had no incentive to fork over money whereas with tornado insurance, that was another matter. As long as your state was routinely in the path of a tornado, it made sense for anyone to buy it, and since the demand was there, and odds were good a tornado would be more selective in its number of victims, it made financial sense for an insurance company to offer it.

There may been other specious reasons. One unidentified insurance agent interviewed by the
Indianapolis Star
in a story that ran on March 27, 1913 tried to explain the reluctance to insure against the river in this way: “When a flood destroys property, everything is swept away, and if flood insurance were written[,] the company would be forced to take the property owner's word for the amount of loss. This arrangement would be very unsatisfactory to any insurance company, and for this reason the writing of flood insurance is not practical. In
the first place, the people do not fear floods, and for this reason there is little demand for insurance to cover damages done by high water.”

The insurance agent was right. As a general rule, people
didn't
fear floods, but they sure did now. The insurers wouldn't bite, however. They knew that flood insurance was a losing proposition for them.

The rest of the country …

For anyone in a safe, dry part of the country and reading the evening papers or going to bed that night, it must have felt as if the country was washing away, from the center outward.

In Milwaukee, almost four hundred miles away from the ground zero that was Dayton, the rain turned the streets into miniature rivers while a tornado-like gale blew down seven of the city's biggest coal conveyors, shattering the massive steel frames into shrapnel. A sign on the top of the city's famed Majestic Building, which was supposedly the largest one-word sign in the world at the time, was hurled off its foundation, the steel frame landing on the roof of a nearby hotel while hundreds of electric light bulbs smashed into the street.

In Racine, a hotel was wrecked, barns were blown apart, trees uprooted, and forty windmills and twenty silos destroyed. Nobody had seen anything like it since the Cyclone of 1883. Heaven help you if you or your home were in the path of any one of these flying objects.

And in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the flooding was at the highest level since 1881. Schools were closed, businesses flooded, and homeowners ran for the second flight of stairs or fled for higher ground altogether.

Just outside of Erie, Illinois, yet another tornado ensured that nineteen-year-old Lulu Ellison, asleep in her home, came to an untimely end when her house collapsed onto her.

In St. Louis, the River Des Peres rose out of its banks, seven feet higher than anyone could remember, and flowed through the neighborhood of Forest Park. While the city came through the flood with minimal damage, ten blocks of houses were submerged and one person drowned: William J. Ross, a 54-year-old African-American carpenter. It was 6:30 in the evening when Ross decided to attempt to wade the current that had surrounded his house. It isn't known if his wife, Lizzie, forty-eight, was inside the house, but she worked out of the home as a laundress. Perhaps Ross decided to pick her up, given the storm
conditions, or he may have been used to seasonal flooding and not been worried. Ross lived in a neighborhood known as the Bottoms, historically an area of the city known for flooding—and poverty.

The water wasn't deep, but the current was powerful, and Ross was knocked off his feet. Whatever came next—drowning or a head injury—his body was found just an hour later.

In Arkansas, in the villages of Leslie and Rumley, approximately ten people were killed by a tornado. One was killed in the town of Clarksville, a little over five hundred miles away from where the first tornado had touched down two days earlier in Omaha.

“The most terrific rain storm in years combined with a heavy thaw played havoc with railroad systems all over the state Sunday and swelled local rivers and creeks until they are well past the flood stage,” reported the
Grand Traverse Herald,
the paper of record for Traverse City, Michigan.

And all the while, it kept raining.

11
P.M.
, Tiffin, Ohio

Sometime during the night, Theresa Klingshirn prepared for the worst. She made a rope out of clothing and tied it around the waists of her two-year-old, Helen, and Catherine, who was four, and possibly eight-year-old Richard. She hoped her children's bodies could be found more easily if they were all together.

The family was prepared for the inevitable but not going down quietly. Across the river bank, George Klingshirn could hear his wife and children shouting and screaming for help.

Then it happened. The house disintegrated into the river. The cries from the wife and children stopped, and the shouting from the crowd started as everyone searched for signs of survival. But there were none, and it was over in a matter of seconds. Somewhere down the river was almost everyone that made up George Klingshirn's life: his wife, his nine children, his young son-in-law, and a future daughter-in-law who was only eighteen years old.

And over the bystanders' din, everyone could make out George, who released an agonized wail that didn't stop.

WEDNESDAY,

MARCH 26, 1913

Chapter Eleven

Fighting Back

March 26, Wednesday

Midnight, Indianapolis

Ben Hecht, the cub reporter out of Chicago, was still stuck in a hotel in Indianapolis. But at midnight, Hecht pretended to be tired and said he was going to retire to his room. Instead, he slipped out of the hotel and into bone-chilling temperatures. If it was still raining, it would soon be snow.

Shivering, Hecht walked along the White River, looking for a place to cross.

After midnight, Cleves, Ohio

Hecht wasn't the only one going for a walk that night. Edward Woods, a 25-year-old machinist living outside of Cleves, a village outside of Cincinnati, went on one himself. The water, as it seemed to be doing everywhere, was rising, and so he and his wife, Katie, made the calculated decision that they couldn't wait until sunrise. They needed to get out of their house, and fast. Corny, but it must be said: the Woods escaped through the woods.

Katie took the hand of her four-year-old son, Richard, and Edward carried Nellie in a container called a half-bushel chip basket, which was usually used for their produce.

The family trudged across swampy hills covered in forestland, and often were, without warning, walking and then wading through kneeand waist-deep water. If they had had a flashlight, lantern, or some sort of light source, it wouldn't have made much of a difference. They were blindly making their way across the land.

That's how Edward came to stumble and fall into some stream of river water, dropping the basket containing Nellie, which moved away from him as if he had just placed it on one of Henry Ford's conveyor belts. The current seized it. Terror-stricken, Edward scrambled through the water, chasing after Nellie, who was crying and drifting away, traveling off somewhere in the darkness. Edward kept racing after Nellie, undoubtedly tripping and stumbling in the darkness, all the while listening for her crying until eventually she was crying no more. Then Edward realized that he wasn't sure where Katie and Richard were, either. What had seemed like a smart, preventative, and proactive decision had turned into a parent's worst nightmare. Both of his children and wife were lost.

Distraught and thinking Nellie was dead, Edward hurriedly tried retracing his steps, searching for Katie and Edward. Rain-soaked, he wandered aimlessly through the forest and swamp for the next two hours, shouting for Katie and Richard, to no avail. And then he heard it. A baby crying.

He later realized he was half a mile away from where he had first dropped the basket. Following the baby's wailing and poking through the bushes, Edward finally found his baby daughter in her basket, wedged in the lower branches of a willow tree. Nellie was wet and uncomfortable, probably hungry and certainly frightened, but she was alive, and she looked okay. Edward, holding his daughter in a tight embrace against his chest, started hiking again. When he reached the village of Cleves, he found Katie and Richard waiting for him.

After midnight, Dayton

For many people, there was no going to bed between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. Arthur John Bell, the intrepid phone
operator in Dayton, was giving interviews or at least passing on information, telling a reporter in Phoneton, Ohio, that the water was still rising, that he estimated the depth of the water at nine feet, and that the current was running strong. Bell had been on the job all day, but if he wanted to sleep, either his adrenaline or commitment to keeping the phone lines open and active wouldn't let him.

Columbus, Ohio, shortly after 1
A
.
M
.

The Broad Street Bridge that spanned the Scioto River finally collapsed. It was the last link between the eastern and western halves of the city, and the Scioto River was still rising. For Albert Dutoit, the train engineer who had spent much of Tuesday traversing railroad tracks to reach the city, it was vexing. He couldn't cross the river on his own, and the one bridge—the Rich Street Bridge—that hadn't fallen was being guarded by police officers and soldiers with the National Guard who wouldn't let him or any resident on it. The only action they allowed on the bridge was for automobiles to travel over it one at a time if they were carrying victims who had been rescued. Rescue workers were also allowed to go over, and that was about it. Besides, it was too dangerous to go downtown, officials no doubt said. But that precisely was why Dutoit wanted to go downtown, of course. His family was there, and, for all he knew, in grave danger.

Peru, Indiana, around 1
A
.
M
.

It began snowing. If you've ever been stranded on a rooftop, freezing and wondering if your house will be swept away and what it will feel like to drown, you can begin to understand how discouraging the sight of snow was for many people, including the rescuers. And yet many people freezing on their rooftops were also dehydrated but hadn't dared drink from the filthy river. The snow gave many Peru residents their first actual fresh, safe drink of water.

Sam Bundy and several other men were still navigating their boats—with nothing more than lantern light to guide them—to houses and trees and picking up people. Bundy was going on twenty-four hours without a break. A lot of people started to notice, full of awe, admiration, and appreciation. A reporter for Huntington, Indiana's paper wrote a fawning piece about Bundy that was syndicated in a couple
other papers in the region. As the nameless reporter said, accurately, Bundy's accomplishments were “a tale of calmness and courage, of strength and skill, of nerve and nobility, of a clean-limbed body and a clear-eyed soul. A tale that will be worth the telling to one's children, and to one's children's children.”

The account noted that Bundy's physical prowess far outmatched the white rescuers.
^“
And those white boatmen were not to be sneered at,” the
Huntington Press
stated. “They had grit, and muscle and stout hearts and capacity for endurance beyond most men, but at the end of twenty-four hours, they had to give up. Some of them were enough rested after twelve hours to go back. When they returned, Chief Bundy was still on the job.”

1:30
A
.
M
., Indianapolis

It was snowing so hard that rescuers could no longer see, and those without gloves and proper clothing were at risk of developing hypothermia. Listening to the screams and crying from people on rooftops, slowly freezing to death themselves, the reluctant rescuers were forced to row back to dry land until sunrise.

Indianapolis, 2
A
.
M
.

Ben Hecht found his way across the White River. It was a high railroad trestle. The river was lapping against the bottom of it and would soon overcome it, but for the moment it looked passable. Hecht lurked about, searching a nearby shack until he found a lantern. He lit it and headed toward the trestle.

Hecht saw a figure approaching him. He held up the lantern and immediately felt the defeated feeling of knowing he wasn't going to get his scoop. In front of him was Christian Dane Hagerty, the Associated Press's former legendary foreign correspondent who now was the director of the AP's Chicago bureau.

Hagerty, according to Hecht's memory, was fifty-five years old now—actually, he was only thirty-seven, but to an eighteen-year-old he probably seemed like he was in his fifties. The legendary Hagerty had also witnessed enough history to give him the gravitas of an older statesman in journalism. He had covered the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Spanish-American
War, and a score of other notable calamities. He once traveled across the country, from New York to San Francisco, by car—in 1906, when traveling by car for even a couple of hours was something of an adventure—with another reporter, in an unsuccessful attempt to set a world's record, most likely fastest cross-country trip. He was on his second marriage and would have a third in the next few years. He had spent time in a Mexican prison on more than one occasion, and legend had it that in the autumn of 1911 in western Chihuahua during the Madero revolution, he was ordered to be shot at sunrise. But as the joke went, Hagerty never woke that early, and so the execution didn't take place.