To add to the horror the Johnstown Bridge, as if to add terror to terror and to make confusion worse confounded, swept from its approaches and precipitated the horror-stricken multitude into the torrent. An overturned stove in a dwelling inaugurated a conflagration. Nearly a hundred people were literally burned to death, thus adding holocaust to the far more preferable death by drowning.
Scarcely had the news of the terrible disaster been sent abroad than the alert newspapers had their commissioners speedily on their way to the scene.
Only the most meagre accounts had been given to the public for the reason that every mode of communication via telegraph or train had been cut off.
When the newspaper representatives reached Johnstown the scene was a pitiable one. The former town was a swamp. Debris was piled here, there and everywhere, and the pestilential stench from the dead bodies was next to unbearable.
Even the trained newspaper men turned their eyes aside and held their nostrils. Corpses everywhere. Dank corpses at that, with glazed, fishy eyes and sloppy wet hair, that made the onlooker feel aweary, and not over anxious to handle.
In a single hole, after the waters had passed by, one hundred and fifty bodies were found. Just imagine it! Two hours before these one hundred and fifty souls were alive, but there they were, huddled together as if they had been congregated for the purpose which had asserted itself.
East Conemaugh was almost depopulated, and Franklinborough, on the north of Johnstown, was entirely swept away. Mineral Point, between Johnstown and the viaduct, was blotted out of existence. If any of the six hundred souls that formerly resided there are alive, the reporters could not find them. Ninevah, just below the Conemaugh furnace, is a city of corpses. Indeed, from South Fork to Bolivar and for a distance of a dozen miles or so the banks of the old-time river are literally strewn with corpses.
After the death-dealing current had gone on the work of tallying began. It will never be ended.
Then the fiends in human shape began their ghoulish work of robbing the dead. Summary punishment was dealt out to some of them. A vigilance committee, hastily organized, ran a score of them into the river, and that was the end of them.