How could 1,000 fatalities and Katrina-scale destruction striking the heart of the industrial north be virtually forgotten? What 1913 warns us today…
Every day for
five weeks beginning about February 20, at least one newspaper or TV reporter was
contacting me about interviews for their 2013 centennial features on the 1913
flood. Similar daily calls and e-mail requests for interviews were bombarding National
Weather Center senior hydrologist
Experts on the Great Easter 1913 flood and tornadoes were in high media demand throughout March 2013; shown here is public radio/TV host Mike McIntyre (right) of WCPN 90.3 FM/WVIZ Channel 25 interviewing Trudy E. Bell (left) and Sarah Jamison (middle) on "The Sound of Ideas" (audio podcast and video are here) |
Sarah Jamison and meteorologist Julia Dian-Reed,
and others from the Silver Jackets, historical societies, museums, and local authors
in several states.
Then at the
end of March, the barrage of calls and e-mail requests suddenly stopped.
The
forgetting has already begun anew.
Originally I
had intended to end the whole series of centennial installments later this year
with a soul-searching essay on the nature of “Remembering and Forgetting.” Last
week’s abrupt cessation of the calls as if a switch had been thrown, however,
leads me to begin exploring this important topic now as a cautionary reflection—with
a warning and an earnest request.
In 1913, it
is evident that the news cycle was almost as fickle as it is today. The
Nebraska-Iowa-Missouri-Indiana tornadoes splashed across front pages for a
couple of days, and then dropped into the interior pages of newspapers as the
widespread flooding in the Midwest took over the AP wires and banner headlines.
Harrowing destruction and heroism in Dayton, Columbus, Indianapolis, along with
heart-rending political cartoons dominated front pages through the end of
March, although gradually ceding inches and headline size to competing stories
about unrelated global news—the heart attack and illness of Pope Pius X, the hunger
strike of U.K. suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, and the capture of Adrianople (now
Edirne) during the First Balkan War. On April 1, the 1913 flood was completely
swept off the front pages of the biggest newspapers by coverage of the death of
financier John Pierpont Morgan, the world’s richest man, along with his
funeral, his will, and his biography.
Yes, on
April 1, the 1913 flood instantly became old news, relegated to shorter stories
on interior pages. But the disaster wasn’t
even over! In fact, it wasn’t even out of the Ohio Valley! Although the
angry waters had drained from much of Ohio and Indiana by April 1, only then were
they cresting further west down the Ohio River at Paducah, Kentucky. Augmented
by runoff from Illinois and Kentucky, the Ohio spread miles wide and flood
crests piled one onto the next, inundating riverside cities. Although the
crests were less sharp than they were upriver, they were of longer duration—the
Ohio remained above flood stage at Cairo, Illinois, for fully three weeks!
After reaching the Mississippi River, floodwaters continued to set record
heights throughout April, a rolling disaster bursting levees, claiming lives,
and wreaking destruction in Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Only
in early May were the flood crests finally exiting the Mississippi’s Atachafalaya
mouth into the Gulf of Mexico. Although the flood continued to dominate news in
local papers in southern states throughout April, the rest of the nation was no
longer paying attention to the death march of the country’s most widespread
natural disaster.
Meantime, in
the industrial north (principally Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky,
and Ohio), unprecedented tornadoes and flooding had left cities, towns, and
landscapes in charred and sodden rubble. In Ohio alone, the canal system was
destroyed. Some 500 bridges had been demolished. Miles of rail lines were twisted
and trestles weakened or collapsed. Some 20,000 homes had been swept away or
crushed, another 35,000 severely damaged, and hundreds of thousands more
soaked, mud-filled, and stinking with mud contaminated by human waste from
flooded vaults of privies. Tens of thousands of books in libraries were
destroyed. Countless livestock and wildlife had perished. Dams had been
compromised or breached. Water purification plants, sewage treatment plants,
and power plants had been inundated and damaged.
Governor James M. Cox—chief
executive of a state now largely in ruins—estimated the destruction just in the
single state of Ohio to be about $300 million, greater than that left by the
1906 San Francisco earthquake. Later figures show the figure for Ohio to be
closer to $200 million (for calculations, see “Like a War Zone”)—but that still
translates to a 2013 equivalent of some $75 billion in a state with maybe 40
percent its population today. Some 600 Ohioans were dead, hundreds of thousands
more left temporarily or permanently homeless, and fully a quarter of the
state’s population had been afflicted by local food famines, destruction of
workplaces, or need to house less fortunate neighbors. The immobilized state
was under martial law. All banking was suspended for three weeks. The American
Red Cross was in charge of disaster relief through August. Federal officials
were inoculating flood refugees and others against smallpox and typhoid fever. Homes
and offices still standing after having been submerged remained too damp to
paint or wallpaper for months. Rebuilding of roads, city streets and buildings,
and other infrastructure lasted well into the next year. Property values
plummeted.
Long after
the floodwaters emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, the appalling intensity of the
natural disaster was felt nationally. Until the 1913 flood, Congress had
resisted comprehensive national policy on flood control measures, contending
that floods were local events that were the purview of individual states. The
downing of communications between Chicago and New York City that ceased stock
market trades for a day and a half, the halting of the U.S. mails on submerged freight
trains for 10 days, and the temporary food famines caused around the nation when
the flooding destroyed rail lines and halted rail traffic demonstrated that severe
floods not only could be multistate or regional disasters but also could have
national consequences. That realization began a nationwide conversation about
flood control measures and policies.
Amateur
“ham” radio operators and the U.S. Army Signal Corps provided emergency radio
communications when the telephone and telegraph lines were down. Their
essential services began a conversation in Congress about the value of
commercial broadcasting and emergency radio as an alternative to wireline
communications. Indeed, in just a few weeks on April 18, the International
Amateur Radio Union is honoring the advent of the second century of emergency radio, dating its
birth to the tireless night-and-day key-tapping Morse wireless communications of
amateur radio operators in Columbus, Ohio, and elsewhere the Midwest during the
1913 flood.
The 1913
tornadoes and flood transformed both the American Red Cross and what is now
known as Rotary International. The record-keeping procedures the Red Cross
devised in 1913 to handle aid to victims over hundreds (even thousands) of
square miles proved essential to its mission on the battlefields of the Great
War (World War I)—the human disaster that brought true international fame to
the Red Cross. Rotarians’ spontaneous outpouring of aid in Omaha, Dayton, and
elsewhere caused Rotary to discover its true humanitarian mission, transcending
its original purpose as a business service organization. And the innovation of federated giving invented by the Community Chest in
Cleveland in February 1913 received its first trial by fire—or flood—the very
next month; its efficiency and success were so outstanding that Community
Chests sprang up in cities around the nation, which eventually evolved into today’s United Way.
So once
again: how does a natural disaster this devastating and widespread, this
long-lasting and influential—get forgotten?
At this
stage, I have partial answers. I am not yet wholly satisfied these are the full
reasons. But they certainly played important roles, and form a valuable start
to further investigation.
First, I
found it puzzling that today memories of the 1913 flood around Ohio and the
Easter tornado in Omaha are still quite alive and well in individual
communities, but their context as part of a national-scale disaster has rarely survived.
Faded from the memory of Omaha citizens were the other 10 or so devastating
tornadoes decimating other towns, cities, and farms. In the Midwest, some of
the collective forgetting doubtless originated in the downed communications,
leaving individuals and families to suffer through the suddenly descending
midnight disaster in utter isolation. Records clearly indicate that sudden descent
of the flood was experienced as profoundly local, and its history has been preserved
that same way. It’s almost as if people perceived the flooding as ending at the
city limits. As a result, the national-scale disaster became dismantled over
time, and preserved only as the Omaha tornado, the Terre Haute tornado, the
Great Dayton Flood, the Chillicothe flood, the Indianapolis flood, etc. With
such dismembering into apparently local tragedies in individual communities, over
time the disaster diminished in importance to later generations. We can watch this same process of
dismantling and diminution going on today, as the multistate devastation across
Louisiana and Mississippi wreaked by the double whammy of Hurricanes Katrina
and Rita in 2005 fades in time and memory—and, inevitably, psychologically
diminished—to a Twitter-short recollection of just the first hurricane
(Katrina) and one city (New Orleans).
Second, the
long, tough, numbing, waterlogged slog toward recovery was not the stuff of
headline news. Shovelfuls of mud scraped out of houses became part of daily life—the
new normal. Little about the aftermath and recovery appeared in later
newspapers, although progress reports of recovery and rehabilitation were
periodically published in several journals of social work. The Omaha World-Herald ran an anniversary special
report in March 1914 on Omaha’s recovery in the year since the Great Easter
1913 Omaha Tornado—but such anniversary commemorations were few.
Third, many
people who suffered devastating losses to tornadoes and flood wanted only to
forget the horrific catastrophe that maimed and killed loved ones and ripped
apart families, homes, and lives. They sought the anodyne of amnesia. The clear
exception is Dayton, whose happy ending with the Miami Conservancy District has
kept the flood in living memory. But Dayton’s oft-repeated narrative still contracted
the natural disaster to the Miami Valley, as if nothing else had been happening
in the other 90 percent of Ohio much less in neighboring states.
Fourth, in
the early 20th century there was acute shame in being destitute—even when
destitution was an arbitrary act of God. Most individuals and small businesses
were stuck with absorbing the total financial loss. In 1913—just like today—most home and business
insurance policies did not cover flooding. Thus, the disaster financially
ruined thousands of families and small business owners. But in 1913, there were
no social safety nets. Indeed, there was such great fear of being perceived as paupers—i.e.,
indigent unworthy poor—that many disaster victims hid their need out of terror of losing respect and standing in the community.
Fifth, and
most chilling of all, in some cities—Omaha and Paducah among them—mayors and
bigger businesses and some newspaper editors who were unabashed community
boosters actively suppressed information
revealing the full scale of the disaster in their cities for fear of
scaring away outside investment (after all, who would want to risk investing in
lands and businesses in a flood zone?) Paducah’s editor actually had the
heartlessness to laugh off the flooding of a third of the city—including the
entirety of the lower section of town where poverty-stricken African Americans
struggled to survive—as a “water carnival.” Direct quote.
And of
course, by 1914, memories of the 1913 tornadoes and flood were soon overwhelmed
by the horrors of the march to the Great War (World War I). Timing is everything.
Many aspects
mentioned above will be explored more fully in published articles and in future
installments to this research weblog (although likely with somewhat reduced
frequency: a research paper per week in addition to my day job is a killing pace).
Now that the
1913 centennial has awakened public awareness to the mammoth scale and
influence—indeed, to the very existence—of the nation’s most widespread natural
disaster, let us today recognize this tragedy fully for what it was. Why is
that important? Not only to honor history and the dead, but also because such a monumental winter storm
system positioned right over the industrial north could indeed recur (see
“Be Very Afraid...”). If forecasts of increased frequency and intensity of storm
systems of all types indeed manifest themselves as predicted and as trend lines
suggest, formerly freakishly rare events of unprecedented strength and
persistence could increase in likelihood. Although loss of life might be less
because of redundant warning systems, material property damage today—given far greater
urban and rural population density, infrastructure, impermeable surfaces, and
personal wealth—would without doubt be orders of magnitude more devastating. Modern
computational modeling and GIS surveys this year in Ohio and Indiana for the
1913 flood centennial have revealed a stark, unsettling truth: many flood walls
existing today, despite their massive appearance, would be inadequate to
withstand a 1913-scale event.
In 1913,
three-quarters of the nation’s industry was east of the Mississippi and north
of the Ohio River. The nation’s industrial heart was the epicenter of the 1913
flood. Floodwaters quenched the fires in blast furnaces in Ohio and
Pennsylvania, derailed trains from New York to Chicago, stilled communications,
and shut down the stock markets. It struck the captains of industry as impartially
as it struck immigrant day laborers. No technology can yet withstand an EF-4
tornado. Are you prepared to withstand the worst?
History has
much to teach us about the future—not only specifics about the physical
catastrophe itself to inform modeling of implications for today’s landscapes,
but also about the human response.
Those
ignorant of history may be doomed to repeat it—and be just as unprepared as all
those who woke in terror at midnight around Easter 1913 by disaster’s crushing
of all they knew.
In April
1913, the nation’s tragedy was still wet, raw, and unfolding. Let us not forget
our national calamity of March–April 1913.
My request: A future installment will be
devoted to preserving memory of 2013 centennial events, new research, and media
coverage across all states in one centralized location for reference. If you
hosted or attended a 1913 commemorative exhibit or event or granted a media
interview, please send me your personal account of it along with
some photos that you or someone else might have taken of its proceedings. If
your newspaper or local TV or radio station featured historical coverage,
please send me the URLs. Let me know also if you or an organization you know
has set up a data base or reference library of digital images accessible to researchers.
Next time: Centennial update: April and beyond
©2013
Trudy E. Bell. For permission to reprint or use, contact Trudy E. Bell at t.e.bell@ieee.org
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