"There seems to have been no leakage through the dam, its destruction resulting from its running over at the top. The estimates for the original dam call for half earth and rock, but there is no indication of it in the broken dam. The riprap was merely a skin on each face, with loose spawls mixed with the earth. The dam was 72 feet high, 2 inches slope to a foot inside, 1-1/2 inches to a foot outside slope and 20 feet thick at the top. The fact that the dam was a reconstructed one, after twenty years disuse, made it especially hard on the old dam to withstand the pressure of the water."
All was over in a few moments' time. The flood rushed down the valley when released from its prison, swept earth, trees, houses and human beings before it, depositing the vast debris in front of the railroad bridge, which formed an impassable barrier to the passage of everything except the vast agent of destruction--the flood--which overflowed it and passed on to wreak fresh vengeance below.
One of the most terrible sights was the gorge at the railroad bridge. This gorge consisted of debris of all kinds welded into an almost solid mass. Here were the charred timbers of houses and the charred and mutilated remains of human beings. The fire at this point, which lasted until June 3 and had still some of its vitality left on the 5th, was one of the incidents of the Johnstown disaster that will become historic. The story has not been and cannot be fully told. One could not look at it without a shock to his sensibilities. So tangled and unyielding was the mass that even dynamite had little effect upon it. One deplorable effect, however, was to dismember the few parts of human bodies wedged in the mass that the ruthless flood left whole.
From the western end of the railroad bridge the view was but a prelude to the views that were to follow. Looking across the gorge the first object the eye caught in the ruined town is the Melville school, standing as a guardian over the dead--a solitary sentinel left on the field after the battle. Still further on and near the center of the town were the offices and stores of the Cambria Iron Company. Beyond and around both buildings were sand flats, mud flats until the 29th of May, the almost navigable water of the flood itself until the 2d of June, the most populous and busy part of the city until the 31st of May. Part of the ground was covered by a part of the shops of the Cambria Company. Not a vestige of these remained.