Great Flood

“ If the scene upon the levee is exciting when efforts are made to avoid breaks, still more so is it when a small break is being closed. The scurrying to and fro; the hoarse shouting of orders; the wild cries for aid from threatened points; men plunging up to their necks in the rushing flood, driving stakes, dragging sacks of earth, heaving in boulders and rubble stone; others bringing timbers and planks from hundreds of yards away ”

“ As far inland as the eye can reach there is nothing but flood to be seen, the currents opening out and racing away in every direction. At some distance away may be seen a flooded settlement, the water washing the windows of fifteen or twenty abandoned cottages. On a huge mound some five or six feet out of the outflow, is a group of disconsolate horses and mules who have taken refuge from the rising flood, and other hungry-looking brutes wander over the levee. ”

“ But there is something greater in its tragedy than all this—something greater than a great region where splendid cities, towns and humble villages alike are without resource—something greater than a region of broken dams and embankments and of placid rivers gone mad in flood, bridgeless, uncontrollable, widened into lakes, into seas. It is the hundreds of dead who died a hideous death, and the hundreds of thousands of living who are left helpless and homeless, and all but hopeless. ”

“ A description of the descent of flood waters from the highland tributaries into the Central Basin has been given in Water-Supply Paper No. 88. It has been shown that the lands of the Central Basin are covered even in ordinary freshets, and that in the event of a great flood the waters merely rise higher, being, for the greater extent, almost quiescent, and beyond the flooding of houses and barns and the destruction of crops, little damage is done. ”

“ The flood rises still higher, in places it breaks the banks of great rivers, houses, temples, city walls and whole villages are swept away by the swift brown water, and thousands of men, women and children perish. Often, too, fires break out in crowded villages and towns. ”

“ Year after year a hundred thousand levee builders, with forty thousand teams of mules or so, and operating huge dredging-machines, repair the damage of the spring tides, build new levees, raise old ones, and pave the banks with revetment—great Willow-tree carpets or rugs covered with broken stone to keep the flood in bounds by stopping the washing away of the soft river banks and the undermining of the protection. ”

“ The aggrading streams by which flood plains are constructed gradually build their immediate banks and beds to higher and higher levels, and therefore find it easy at times of great floods to break their natural embankments and take new courses over the plain. ”

“ The great flood of 1877 rose two feet six inches above the bank of the Salween at Shoaygoon, or to a level twenty feet above the ground in the interior; but owing to the breadth of the valley and the slope of the country, the flood-water passed off in a stream a mile in breadth and about ten feet deep.
Leaving the valley, we proceeded over laterite ground, amongst small trees and scrub-jungle. Before reaching the Hlineboay river we had been pretty nearly jolted to death by our abominable driver, the worst and most apathetic of his kind I have ever suffered from. ”

“ The creek current, swollen by rains, washed down the little valley with increasing force. The great low surges of waves that heaved out of the main torrent of the Mississippi worked against the flood in the creek-bed, so that the cabin-boat was washed back and forth, pulling the stake every time it sagged away. ”

“ Not a nation or tribe of either inland or coast possessions, civilized or barbaric, but unites in the story of a great flood. This, I maintain, was caused by—avoiding technical terms—a shrinkage of the earth's surface due to the settling of substrata even today manifested in lesser degree by earthquakes more or less persistent along recognized zones. ”

“ But when ye have journeyed with much toil and no little peril over the mountain-necks, for by the gorge of the river, as aforesaid, no man may go, and have come out of the mountains once more, then again ye have the flood before you, cleaving a great waste of rocks mingled with sand, where groweth neither tree nor bush nor grass ”

“ Before very long a great flood will take place in this district, and will sweep everything before it. It will be so sudden that men will not be able to take measures to preserve either their lives or their property—so instantaneous will be the rush of the mighty streams, like ocean floods, from the mountains you can see in the West. ”

“ The fact is enough. It challenges, staggers, calls a halt, compels men and women to think—and even to pray.
But the flood did not confine itself to Dayton. It laid its watery hand of death and destruction over a whole tier of states from the Great Lakes to New England, and over the vast area to the southward which is veined by the Ohio River and its tributaries, and extending from the Mississippi Valley almost to the Atlantic seaboard. ”

“ The great inundation will subside not faster than one or two inches each day, uncovering the land by degrees so slow and tedious as to weary the hopes and sicken the hearts of the owners and tillers of the soil. ”

“ The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst forth we are not interested to search for or explore. But so great a flood, spread far and wide to every quarter of the globe, has of necessity engulfed many a fair province of right that lies very near to us. ”

“ The greater also would be the probability of the stream, on the cessation of the flood, not returning to its original channel, which might have become obliterated or filled up, but of its flowing along some new course, it may be miles away from its former channel. Even when not flooded so as to overflow their banks, rivers along which a larger body of water flowed than there does at present, would, so long as they were not confined within deep valleys, have a tendency to wander over a much wider tract of country than that now occupied by their valleys. ”

“ Self-abandoned, relaxed, and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, and felt the torrent come: to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength. ”

“ We find, indeed, that inundations produced by obstructions in river-courses are among the most disastrous consequences of great earthquakes in all parts of the world, for the alluvial plains in the bottoms of valleys are usually the most fertile and well-peopled parts of the whole country; and whether the site of a town is above or below a temporary barrier in the channel of a river, it is exposed to injury by the waters either of a lake or flood. ”

“ The great floods to which the valleys of many large rivers are subject, more especially those which have their sources in tropical regions, sometimes devastate the whole country within miles of their banks, and by their suddenness frequently overtake and carry down numbers of both men and animals, together with large quantities of timber which had grown upon the sides of the valleys. ”

“ But it quite often happens that after unusually heavy winter snows the warm weather sets in in the mountains very early: so that the great floods of the upper valleys reach the lower river just when extremely heavy rains are prevalent in the central and southern regions. ”

“ Now from the mountains it cometh in three great forces, and many smaller ones, and perilous and awful is it to behold; for betwixt those forces it filleth all the mountain ghyll, and there is no foothold for man, nay for goat, save at a hundred foot or more above the water, and that evil and perilous ”

“ In such countries men are exposed to calamities on an enormous scale, great floods, violent storms and deluges of rain, earthquakes, excessive droughts resulting in famine and plague; and they are exposed to the attacks of many dangerous animal species, which are bred by the great heat in the dense and unconquerable forests. These disasters have repeatedly occurred on a scale such that in comparison with them the recent earthquake in California appears a mere trifle. ”

“ There is a smell of burning in the air, in spite of the rush of deluging rain slanting down like waterspouts on to the earth. Chief, councillors, captive, populace, can hardly see each other as they raise their heads, which they have bent, appalled beneath the crashing thunder-note of heaven. The blinding flood pours down upon them, lashing up the ground into a very torrent of liquid mud, as again that frightful peal shakes the earth, and the gleam of a fiery sea is in their eyes. ”

“ But at new moons, especially when they occur in conjunction with a night tide, the flood sets in with such extraordinary violence that on its beginning to advance, even though the sea be calm, its roar is heard by those living near the river’s mouth, sounding like the tumult of battle heard far off, and soon after the sea with its hissing waves bursts over the bare shoals. ”

“ We could have saved more, but many were afraid to let go the debris. It was an awful sight. The immense volume of water was roaring along, whirling over huge rocks, dashing against the banks and leaping high in the air, and this seething flood was strewn with timber, trunks of trees, parts of houses, and hundreds of human beings, cattle and almost every animal.
“The fearful peril of the living was not more awful than the horror of hundreds of distorted, bleeding corpses whirling along the avalanche of death. ”

“ On our way back to camp after these first observations I planned a far-and-wide excursion for the morrow. I awoke early, called not only by the glacier, which had been on my mind all night, but by a grand flood-storm. The wind was blowing a gale from the north and the rain was flying with the clouds in a wide passionate horizontal flood, as if it were all passing over the country instead of falling on it. The main perennial streams were booming high above their banks, and hundreds of new ones, roaring like the sea, almost covered the lofty gray walls of the inlet with white cascades and falls. ”

“ On the American side, I beheld a vast deluge, nine hundred feet in breadth, with a fall of one hundred and eighty or ninety, met, fifty feet above the level of the gulf, by a huge projection of rock, which seems to break the descent and continuity of the flood, only to increase its fierce and overwhelming bound. ”

“ The dam is still there, however, and over its brink the water flows in softest measures, to strike the rocky shelves below, where it boils and brawls in confused dismemberment until joined again in an unbroken stream. The banks rise rapidly, while the river draws deeper into its bed, until presently making a leap at Giant Falls it plunges into a great gorge whose walls have been eaten by the floods and ice of centuries. But it is by a succession of falls and cataracts that the stream reaches its greatest depression, which is known as the Grand Flume. ”

“ Great floods have flown
From simple sources, and great seas have dried
When miracles have by the greatest been denied. ”

“ Before many days passed the sun dried the fields, meadows, and roads, the wind carried away much of the debris, the grass grew more lush, the damages were repaired, and hardly a trace remained of the destructive flood ”

“ It is true that a wall of earth everywhere controls the flood to-day, and that the traveller in his boat does not see, as he would have seen two thousand years ago, the glint of water to the north and south at high tide over tufted grass and drowned banks of mud for miles upon either side of his going. ”

“ The river boundary in summer flood,
The swirling waters as they rush and roar,
Mock at the wearied limbs that reach their banks,
And can no more, although the foe is on them!
Numbers die here; numbers plunge in—and drown. ”

“ Though primarily trading towns, linked together once in the sovereign confederacy of the Hanseatic League, they fixed their sites on the last spurs of firm ground running out into the soft, yielding alluvium, which was constantly exposed to inundation. Land high enough to be above the ever threatening flood of river and storm-driven tide on this flat coast, and solid enough to be built upon, could not be found immediately on the sea. ”

“ The same storm, having gone out to sea with the ebb, would come back on the flood tide and keep the farmers awake who lived under a roof of thatch. Good cause; I have seen as many as half a score of farm-houses burning after a long night’s storm. Thus, too, people died when the tide ebbed. One who was on his death-bed could not find rest while the tide was in, but when it went out he went out with it. ”

“ Millions of people were affected by the flood, and the newspapers and magazines of the whole world recorded its incidents and features, though none, nor all of them together were able to give an adequate impression of the spectacle of power, the fearsomeness and the grandeur of that majestic flow of water. ”

“ The downpour fell with the heavy uninterrupted rush of a sweeping flood, with a sound of unchecked overwhelming fury that called to one’s mind the images of collapsing bridges, of uprooted trees, of undermined mountains. No man could breast the colossal and headlong stream that seemed to break and swirl against the dim stillness in which we were precariously sheltered as if on an island. ”

“ With a fierce rush, like a live crittur, the flood threw itself at the sea. We just footed it over the small waves, then we cut the top off the first roller, throwing up columns of spray high as the church steeple, and then the fight began. Behind us there was a hundred miles of flood; before us was the tide with the Atlantic at the back, and the sea after the first shock jes’ gave a sort of surly roar, and away back of the outermost breaker I seed a dark line coming along steady and unbroken. ”