CATASTROPHE: Hell & High Water

Down, down, down all last fortnight rain poured on the U. S. from Arkansas to Pennsylvania. In Missouri and Illinois it fell two inches at a time. On southern Ohio half a foot was dumped in 48 hours. Up, up, up last week rose the long, wide rivers of the Ohio and central Mississippi systems, the brown, frothy water creeping up the banks, lipping up the sides of the levees, spilling over the top and then surging and thundering into the river towns, killing 58 people, routing 550,000 from their homes, destroying millions of dollars worth of property in an area of 20,000 sq. mi. With the water 8 ft. above flood stage at Pittsburgh, 10 at Wheeling, 21 at Cincinnati at week's end (see map), the still-rising 1937 flood had already taken more lives than the 1936 inundation of the upper Ohio and Susquehanna slopes. For size and damage it was a far greater national disaster. In the lower Ohio Valley there never had been such a flood. The reason for last year's flood was that the winter was too cold. The snow stayed on the ground too deep and too long. When it suddenly thawed, the water ran off in a rush because the ground was still frozen. The reason for last week's flood was that the Eastern winter had not been cold enough. Instead of remaining on the ground as snow and draining gradually, the winter precipitation had fallen as cold rain, millions of tons of it, to make a wet and gloomy hell of high water as the swollen torrent swept 900 mi. south-west through ten sodden States. Pennsylvania got off comparatively easy this year. The citizens of Johnstown, which can never forget 1889, got worried when the Conemaugh went to five feet above normal after a 72-hr, rain, but few Johnstownians took the precaution of moving to higher ground. Pittsburgh's "Golden Triangle," the downtown district where the Monongahela and Allegheny meet to form the Ohio, got its feet wet near the river banks, but there was no likelihood of a repetition of last March's 46-ft. flood stage. West Virginia bore the flood's brunt in the upper Ohio valley. Rising 2 in. an hour toward a 47-ft. crest, the river submerged residential Wheeling Island and the Red Cross ordered its 10,000 inhabitants evacuated. Bus and trolley service was virtually abandoned and, with mills crippled and mines flooded, 30,000 were jobless in the area. In the 100 mr. between Parkersburg and Huntington, thousands were driven from their homes. Not a store was open on Point Pleasant's Main Street as trucks hauled everything movable back into the hills. Synagogs and churches were turned into rescue stations and refugee barracks. The Baltimore & Ohio R. R. suspended operation on its Ohio Division. Ohio.

In Ohio the river which gives the State its name went hog wild, first broke all records established in the 1913 flood, then proceeded to top the even more disastrous inundations of 1884. Full of foam, mud and debris, the Scioto River swept down on Portsmouth, which seven years ago threw up a $750,000 sea wall of steel & concrete to keep the Scioto and Ohio away from its doors. Last year to the 62-ft. wall was added a supplementing levee of sandbags and Portsmouth stayed dry. This year the flood was not to be cheated.