FEARFUL FLOODS IN MASSACHUSETTS.

Evening Star, Issue 3550, 9 July 1874, Page 3

FEARFUL FLOODS IN MASSACHUSETTS.

145 persons droWned.—l.OOO,ooo dollars WORTH OP PROPERTY DESTROYED. — 4OO FAMILIES HOUSELESS. The floods in Massachusetts, of which only brief mention was made in a recent telegram, have proved to be most serious. The most terrible disaster in the aunals of Massachusetts, (says the ‘ Alta ’ of May 27,) occurred in Hampshire ' ounty, on Saturday. The Williamsburg reservoir, covering a tract of .over one hundred acres, gave way early in the forenoon, precipitating the vast mass of water it contained three miles down a steep and narrow valley into the thriving manufacturing village of Williamsburg, and thence further down the valley, through the villages of Hadenville, Leeds, and Florence, into the Northampton Meadows, where the stream empties into the Connecticut river. The huge torrent, dashing into Williamsburg with resistless power, swept away in a moment the manufacturing establishments and numbers of dwellings, causing enormous destruction of property, and terrible loss of human life. The lower villages suffered only less awfully. The reservoir which burst was a wall of masonry five teeb at the thickest, backed and faced with fifty feet of earth. It was twenty-five feet in depth, and four hundred and fifty feet long. Behind it was a lake of one hundred and four acres, holding three million tens of water. On Friday night last it rained hard. At halfpast seven on Saturday morning, Cheney, one of the dam watchers, was in front of his dam when he saw in the east branch a spurt of water near the base. In a moment he turned to his barn, jumped on his mare, and ran her for dear life down the road to Williamsburg. He looked back once, and saw that out of an enormous bi each in the earth and masonry, a torrent o! water had burst into the air. Thgre was no dam, there was nothing to be seen but the front of a huge, rolling wave, which was carrying on its very crest the great stone blocks of the wall, and dashing them down the ste* p incline of the valley. The speed of this torrent increased every moment, but Cheney was gone, riding recklessly over the sconey and muddy roads to give,-the warning where fifty homes were in the direct path of the flood. He went over the terrible two and a-half miles at so rapid a pace that in ten minutes he was crying and yelling like a madman among the cottages of Williamsburp, “The dam 1 the dam is burst; get up to the high ground, the water is coming.” It had come. Ten mintues was fully enough for that mountain of water going down a decline of one foot in six to reach the first victims. There they stood, pretty white cottages in rows and rectangles on the fiats. The gorge had been narrow above, and a thirty foot moving wall of water and limestone rock nndistinguishable was upon them, over them, and spread out upon the plain, roaring like the crash of near thunder, and tumbling down the frightened valley at twenty miles an hour. Those who were safe before the news came escaped ; fortheresttbey took the chances of the floold. " ome clung to their houses, but houses were mere toys of paper, swept like fathers here and there, piled oqe upon the other, upset, spun round, lifted bodily and broken in twain against the trees, lifted into the air and ground to splinters between the fl.od, beaten and buff-.tied *nd tossed adrift with all that was human in them, shaken into the railway speed of the deluge of timbers, and quartz rocks, and water. Some fled and were overwhelmed be fore the ej es ®f their friends; some went mad, and rode the deluge down the valley shrieking. Here and there one could be seen sitting upon the roof of his shaking hotm, and clinging to it as the billows struck it. Of these last, one or two ecaped by the sudden stay ing of the waves. It was all over in a short naif hour, and the waste had gone down the valley not unheralded entirely. An hour from the alarm at Williamsburg, the waters had doue their work, and in half an hour more had lost their power : 120 buildings are destroyed, hundreds of acres covered with stone and mud. No one has attempted to estimate the loss in money. As for human life, to-night 90 bodies in all have been found, and squads of men here and thero through the valley are looking for the missing. Scarcely a trace has been left of the removed habitations, so completely had the torrent ploughed up the ground in all directions.