THE BRIDGE WHERE HUNDREDS LOST THEIR LIVES.
The "fatal bridge," as it is now called, and which wreaked such awful destruction, is described by a writer in this way:
"The bridge whose 'resistance of the torrent' was the matter of so much talk, was a noble four-track structure, just completed, fifty feet wide on top, 32 feet high above the water line, consisting of seven skew spans of fifty-eight feet each. It still remains wholly uninjured, except that it is badly spalled on the upper side by blows from the wreckage, but that it so remains is due solely to the accident of its position, and not to its strength, although it was and is still the embodiment of solidity.
"Had the torrent struck it, it would have swept it away as if it had been built of card-board, leaving no track behind; but fortunately (or unfortunately) its axis was exactly parallel with the path of the flood, which hence struck the face of the mountain full, and compressed the whole of its spoils gathered in a fourteen-mile course into one inextricable mass, with the force of tens of thousands of tons moving at nearly sixty miles per hour.
"Its spoils consisted of (1) every tree the flood had touched in its whole course, with trifling exceptions, including hundreds of large trees, all of which were stripped of their bark and small limbs almost at once; (2) all the houses in a thickly settled town three miles long and one-fourth to one-half mile wide; (3) half the human beings and all the horses, cows, cats, dogs, and rats that were in the houses; (4) many hundreds of miles of telegraph wire that was on strong poles in use, and many times more than this that was in stock in the mills; (5) perhaps 50 miles of track and track material, rails and all; (6) locomotives, pig-iron, brick, stone, boilers, steam engines, heavy machinery, and other spoil of a large manufacturing town.
"All this was accumulated in one inextricable mass, which almost immediately caught fire from some stove which the waters had not touched. Hundreds if not thousands of human beings, dead and alive, were caught in it, many by the lower part of the body only. Eye-witnesses describe the groans and cries which came from that vast holocaust for nearly the whole night as something almost unbearable to listen to, yet which could not be escaped. Hundreds, undoubtedly, suffered a slow death by fire; yet we cannot doubt that the vast majority of the men, women, and children in that fearful jam, which covered fully thirty acres, and perhaps more, were already dead when the fire began.