A modern reanalysis of official
reports reveals that some 1,000 lives were lost in ‘Our National Calamity’
“Death rode ruthless on the waters that night while hundreds saved their
lives by what seemed miracles of chance,” wrote Ernest P. Bicknell, the National
Director of the American Red Cross, long after the 1913 floodwaters had receded.
Initial newspaper headlines wildly exaggerated estimated fatalities—but official
reports significantly underreported fatalities.
Just how many people did die as a result of the March 1913
natural disaster? And why are official
reports so inconsistent?
First, to count a death, you have
to know about it. Drowning in the flood or being crushed under tornado wreckage
is obviously a death directly attributable to the disaster. So clearly is dying
of a heart attack from terror, or succumbing to exposure after 48 hours in
subfreezing temperatures on a roof or in a tree. But other disaster-related
deaths—such as dying weeks later from a severe injury that developed tetanus or
gangrene, or months later from pneumonia, typhoid fever, or smallpox contracted
in a refugee camp—often occurred after official reports were published. While
hospitals may have thought to report such a death to an agency collecting
statistics, families of individuals who died at home likely did not—especially
if they were immigrants not fluent in English or were among the uneducated poor
(and make no mistake, the poor were disproportionately
hit because their homes were often on undesirable low land or even flood plain
close to factories). Nor did authors of official reports have the resources to
contact every county coroner across a dozen states for official causes of
death. So in 1913 (and likely also in natural disasters today), official death
counts are virtually certain to be below actual fatalities.
Second, in principle you find all
the bodies, line them up, and count them. But the 1913 tornadoes and floods
were so violent that people simply vanished without a trace. For weeks
afterwards, unidentified bodies were recovered down the Ohio River or even down
the Mississippi. Absent DNA testing, when a half-decayed corpse was found, bloated
and mangled beyond recognition, there was no definitive way to tie it back to a
specific person missing in some state upriver. Thus, body counts are only
partial counts. How partial? A year after the disaster in May 1914, George
Burba, Secretary to Ohio Governor James M. Cox, declared: “After the waters had
subsided, 428 bodies were recovered, and probably half as many more were never
found.” Moreover, undercounting was worst precisely in those places where the
calamity was most violent—where tornados whirled heavy objects (including
bodies) for miles or where walls of water swept through a city, carrying away trees
and houses (and people). Disappearance compounded the tragedy: In at least one
instance, absent a body, a woman was barred from collecting life insurance to
support her children when her husband was swept away.
Third, fatalities should be counted
over the full multistate geographical area afflicted from Nebraska to New York
and down the Mississippi. In 1913, however, not even the Federal government was
able to achieve geographical completeness. Not for lack of trying. The U.S.
Geological Survey and the Weather Bureau sought definitive statistics. But
their sources of information were incomplete. The USGS, for example, sent out
questionnaires to 200 cities over 5,000 population, but only 120 returned
answers; moreover, cities under 5,000—of which there were (and still are) many
in the Midwest—did not get polled. The American Red Cross, the U.S.’s official
disaster relief agency since 1905, devised a stellar registration system for
recording the plights of tornado and flood sufferers; but in 1913 the Red Cross
was still sufficiently small that its few dozen agents and 236 nurses could not
be everyplace—so they focused efforts primarily in the 112 hardest-hit communities
of Ohio (including Dayton), primarily along Ohio’s five major rivers. Fully
half the counties in Indiana decided to care for their own victims, so the Red
Cross had even less of a presence. Outside of Omaha, Nebraska, and Lower Peach
Tree, Alabama, its presence in other regions was sparse or nonexistent. No Red
Cross, no records.
Some counts were done by organizations
whose concerns were confined to smaller territories (states or even just individual
river valleys) or specific areas of interest (e.g., flooding alone or tornadoes
alone). Most notable was the work of the Ohio State Board of Health headed by Secretary
and Executive Officer Eugene F. McCampbell. Physicians and sanitation engineers
spread out over the state from flood week through the end of April,
disseminating disinfectants and instructions, seeing that animal carcasses and supplies
contaminated food were destroyed (yes, unscrupulous merchants tried to sell
meat that had been submerged), and reporting on houses destroyed, people
injured or left homeless, and deaths. The teams clearly note they did not visit
every community nor examine all situations with their own eyes; they also noted
that in several towns officials were antagonistic to their
information-gathering or sanitation help.
The Board’s 145-page “Special
Report on the Flood of March, 1913,” issued phenomenally fast in May, reported
that in Ohio “approximately 430 lives were lost”—434 to be precise (totaling them
on an Excel spreadsheet). However, for the Board’s year-end annual report in
December—which is almost never cited in later histories— McCampbell adjusted
some death counts in such a way as to call his first official numbers into
question. He raised some numbers (e.g., those for Tiffin, from 19 to 30) while
he reduced others (e.g., those for Hamilton, from 85 to 72, based strictly on
body count). The December report also notes that in the city of Delaware, 18 bodies were found but another 21 persons were still missing. Depending on which numbers seem most acceptable, the resulting
official death toll for Ohio is left somewhere between 422 to 470. In December,
McCampbell doesn’t even hazard a final total.
No other state board of health or
other agency appears to have mobilized a similar effort. One Federal report by
the U.S. Public Health Service did visit five Kentucky cities to provide
sanitation services and collect information, but did not record death counts or
injuries(!).In Indiana, one official report documents only property damage
along the lower White River in seven counties, but does not address deaths. The
only other “official” records about the 1913 flood in Indiana are two brief
typed manuscripts compiled in 1935 and 1937 in the Indiana State Archives, one
of which consists of a compilation of statistics from newspaper reports. Figures
in this latter, expressed in ranges, suggests that the death toll in Indiana
was 100 to 200 lives—which may be fair given that Ohio’s topped 400 and that
Indiana was as struck by surprise as Ohio.
The axiom (sometimes attributed to
Carl Sagan) that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” comes to
mind. In the absence of official numbers from other states, one unfortunate result
has been that McCampbell’s numbers for Ohio published in May 1913 have been
taken by subsequent historians to represent all fatalities in the entire natural
disaster—with the possible implication that Ohio was the only state affected.
That is a serious error. It might be one key as to the obscurity of the
monumental scale of the storm system that stretched from Nebraska to New York
(I remain baffled how something so enormous could be forgotten), including
dissociating the flooding from the devastating tornadoes.
The Weather Bureau reported statistics
about the entire geographical scale of the flooding—excluding the tornadoes—in
its special Bulletin Z titled The Floods
of 1913 in the Rivers of the Ohio and Lower Mississippi Valleys. It
contains the only attempt at collecting definitive information on property
damage from states bordering the Mississippi after the flood crest had exited
the Ohio River. Ohio is given a death toll of 467 (tallied by county, not city,
on pages 67-69); Bulletin Z also quotes an official investigation at Hamilton
that put the body count at 92 but the “loss of life, probably” of 150—more than
50 percent higher (page 55). Death tolls are not provided for other states.
The U.S. Geological Survey in its Water-Supply
Paper The Ohio Valley Flood of
March–April, 1913, Including Comparisons with Some Earlier Floods drops the
Ohio death count by an even 100 to 367—making one suspect a copying error from
Bulletin Z. The Water-Supply paper, however, is one of the few reports with
statistics about flood deaths outside of Ohio: It cites a death count of 39 for
Indiana, 4 for West Virginia, 2 for each of Illinois and Pennsylvania, and 1
for Kentucky for a total of 48 flood deaths in those five states. Why should
those numbers be so much lower than Ohio? Keep in mind, the flood was a rolling
disaster. The flood crests of the upper Ohio River didn’t reach the Mississippi
River until early April, and took another three weeks to roar down the
Mississippi—bursting levees en route—until exiting out the Atchafalaya mouth of
the Mississippi around May 1. Citizens of Paducah, Kentucky and other cities
down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers had days of warning, enough actually to
build substantial wooden flood-refugee housing on higher ground in advance of
the approaching flood crests. The death toll in Ohio—and also in Indiana—was an
order of magnitude greater because the disaster struck with no warning. That being
said, 39 flood deaths in Indiana seems so low as to be suspect as an undercount:
after all, in Peru, Logansport, and elsewhere along the Wabash—whose headwaters
are in Ohio along the same continental divide over which the heaviest rainfall
concentrated—the flood came as unexpectedly as it did in Ohio.
Meantime, the Red Cross remained in
Ohio doing relief work through August 1913. Possibly because of spending five
months on the ground and being able to count additional deaths that were not
immediate, the Red Cross cited higher numbers that kept edging upward. For
example, although the Ohio State Board of Health ascribes 98 deaths to Dayton, but 1914 the Red Cross had upped Dayton's death toll to 116. By October 1913, Bicknell stated in an official report on donations
and outlays for the disaster: “About 600 persons were drowned in the entire
flood area.” Unfortunately, he did not specify what state(s) comprised that
area. In 1914, Red Cross worker Winthrop D. Lane stated, however, that the
flood “killed 625 people in two states alone,” clearly meaning Ohio and
Indiana. It is not stated whether these figures are based on body count, but
Bicknell clearly states “drowned.”
Four men carry a flood victim past the Dayton Courthouse in Ohio. Walking behind them are a man and a woman, likely family of the deceased. [Credit: Dayton Metro Library] |
Given the Red Cross’s meticulous record-keeping
for purposes of granting relief aid, let’s take those numbers at their word. So
the total for flood deaths in Ohio and Indiana was likely about 625, likely including
at least some who died much later from infection or other storm-related complications.
Let’s also add the additional 11 deaths the USGS counted outside of Indiana, plus
some reasonable allowance for people who were swept away but their bodies not
recovered. In round numbers, that would bring the total to the neighborhood of
650 who died as a result of angry waters.
Let us not forget the Good Friday
windstorm and the Good Friday and Easter tornadoes. For tornadoes, a widely
recognized definitive secondary source is the two-volume reference Significant Tornadoes by Thomas P.
Grazulis, who scoured newspapers on microfilm and other references in all 50
states to compile records of all tornadoes of F-2 and greater from 1880 to
1989. According to Grazulis’s research, all the Good Friday tornadoes in
Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi claimed 50 lives. All the Easter Sunday
tornadoes in Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, plus Louisiana and Missouri killed 192
people. Another seven lost their lives to tornadoes on Easter Monday. All those
tornado fatalities add 249 deaths to the about 650 likely for the flood zone,
bringing the death toll to about 900.
Right-click on the image of the table to download the JPEG and view it larger on your own computer. Table ©2013 Trudy E. Bell |
The real eye-opener is the death
toll from the mammoth Good Friday windstorm that swept the eastern half of the
U.S. from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, not counting deaths from tornadoes. There are no official reports
for these onesies and twosies, so numbers must be gleaned from local
newspapers—but deaths at a few at a time are what local dailies cover best,
including enough details about individual victims (name, town, profession) that
duplication can be eliminated in AP wire stories run in several papers. Deaths
caused by the straight winds from chimneys falling, worker blown from
scaffolds, vehicles overturned, etc. total at least 66 across 11 states
(Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West
Virginia)—a number tallied from just three Dayton newspapers in stories
published on March 21 and 22, and thus not at all comprehensive. Yes, the Good
Friday windstorm alone was so vast and powerful that hurricane-force straight
winds killed more people across 11 states than did the Good Friday tornadoes that
devastated Lower Peach Tree and elsewhere.
In short, the total storm-related
death toll from Good Friday, March 21 (the Good Friday windstorm and tornadoes)
through the following Friday, March 28 (the flood peak in the Hudson River) is conservatively
greater than 900, and very likely over 1,000.
The sad truth is we may never know
with exactness.
But two important things are clear.
First, a realistic death toll for the full multistate extent of “Our National
Calamity” was far greater than the 400s often cited for Ohio alone—in fact, evidence
is strong that anywhere in the 400s is likely an undercount even for Ohio. Moreover,
official death counts—in a natural disaster so violent that bodies were swept
away or destroyed, and people died later of disaster-related injury or disease—should
be regarded cautiously only as minimums.
©2012–2013
Trudy E. Bell. For permission to reprint or use, contact Trudy E. Bell at t.e.bell@ieee.org
Next time: So Many Ways to Die
Selected References
Bicknell, Ernest
P., “The Ohio Flood of 1913—Our First Great Relief Task,” The Red Cross Courier, September 1914.
Burba,
George F., “The State’s Part in the Emergency,” [one article of a special
section by American Red Cross authors, "When Disaster Comes"] The Survey 32 (5): 113-153, May 2, 1914.
Bybee, Hal
P., and Clyde A. Malott, “The Flood of 1913 in the Lower White River Region of
Indiana,” Indiana University Studies
II (22): 105–223, October 1914.
Grazulis,
Thomas P., Significant Tornadoes,
1880-1989. St. Johnsbury, VT: Environmental Films, 1991. Classic and
fascinating two-volume reference detailing virtually every U.S. tornado F2 and
greater for more than a century. Grazulis now runs The Tornado Project.
Henry,
Alfred J., The Floods of 1913 in the
Rivers of the Ohio and Lower Mississippi Valleys. Bulletin Z. U.S.
Department of Agriculture. Weather Bureau. Washington, Government Printing
Office, 1913.
“Historical
Study of Floods in Indiana,” compiled in 1935. Plus O’Harrow, Dennis, “Indiana
Flood Damage,” State Planning Board of Indiana, February 1937. Many thanks to
Nancy Germano for providing me PDFs of these two typed manuscripts in the
Indiana State Archives.
Horton, A.
H. and H. J. Jackson, The Ohio Valley
Flood of March–April, 1913, Including Comparisons with Some Earlier Floods,
(Department of the Interior, United States Geological Survey, Water-Supply
Paper 334, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1913).
Lumsden,
L.L., Sanitation of Flood-Stricken Towns
and Cities, with Special Reference to Conditions Observed in River Towns and
Cities of Kentucky, U.S. Public Health Service, Public Health Reports,
Reprint No. 131, June 13, 1913; Washington, Government Printing Office, 1913.
[McCampbell,
E. F.] Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the
State Board of Health of Ohio. For the Year Ending December 31, 1913.
(Columbus, Ohio: The F. J. Herr Printing Co., 1914.
McCampbell,
E. F., “Special Report on the Flood of March, 1913,” reprinted from Monthly Bulletin Ohio State Board of Health,
May 1913; pp 299–445.
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