But, though the whistle was a warning, and the hills were a refuge to the people of East Conemaugh, the lives of twenty-four were lost; while of the passengers on the trains, twenty-six are known to have perished.
One family were carried down in their house, which held together till it drifted against the steep hillside, some distance below, where it was arrested long enough for them to make their escape.
Two sisters, clinging to driftwood, were being swept past the woolen mill in Woodvale, when a rope was thrown to them and they were saved.
One man was carried on a drifting log clear through Johnstown and over into Kernville, to find deliverance at the end of a wild, three-miles ride. Another, overtaken at the fair grounds, climbed on the ticket shed, and thence upon a telephone pole. This being quickly broken down by the impact of some solid body, he mounted a passing log and dashed ahead all the way to the stone bridge, a distance of more than two miles. Here he took hold of some wreckage, and by the backwater was carried to Main street, near the Presbyterian church, whence he worked his way to final safety.
A quarter of a mile below East Conemaugh was the town of Woodvale. The story of its calamity has few details, since all its five thousand inhabitants were either drowning or engaged in a mad struggle for their lives. Every one of its eight hundred houses was lifted in a minute--not one
remained; nothing but parts of the walls of the large woollen and flour mills. To the hills forty or sixty rods distant, not many succeeded in escaping. Relatively but few attempted it, for when the whistles sounded the alarm, the hills were too distant and the flood was too near. Such as fled were overtaken by the raging waters, and, to make destruction doubly sure, a freight train was standing between them and the hill, and this at the supreme moment, began to move. Thus many perished when there was but a step between them and deliverance. The houses were mostly frames, and the people were commonly swept away with their shattered dwellings. We know there were thousands of wonderful escapes, the recital of which would fill a bulky volume; but more than one-third of the total population were quickly counted with the dead.