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  3. Take to the Hills! The rider galloped at top speed down the hill and on into the valley, through the pouring rain. "The dam

Take to the Hills! The rider galloped at top speed down the hill and on into the valley, through the pouring rain. "The dam

admin2013-05-19  39
问题                        Take to the Hills!
    The rider galloped at top speed down the hill and on into the valley, through the pouring rain. "The dam is going!" A few residents of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, took the rider’s advice —and lived. Thousands of people, however, either never got the rider’s message or chose to disregard it. Many of those who didn’t heed the warning paid with their lives.
    The citizens of Johnstown in 1889 had good reason for ignoring the advice. Once a year the old South Fork Dam seemed about to burst. The cry, "Take to the hills." had become an annual false alarm.
    This time, however, the rider’s warning should have been taken in earnest. The rider was John G. Parke, a civil engineer who was in charge of the dam.
    The Great South Fork Dam was a huge earthen dike holding back the waters of an artificial lake. The dam had been constructed without any stone or cement. It had been built by piling up layer upon layer of soil, until the dam was 100 feet high. It was 90 feet wide at its base.
    The dam had passed through the hands of a series of owners. In recent years the dam and the lake behind it had been bought by a group of millionaires. The millionaires called themselves the Great South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. They spent thousands of dollars stocking the lake with fish. They also added screens to prevent the fish from getting out through the dam’s drainage holes.
    Fishing was good, and the lake had never been higher than that spring of 1889. May had been an unusually rainy month. The streets in the lower parts of Johnstown were already flooded with six feet of water. Behind the dam, the lake had been rising at the rate of one foot per hour. The owners of the fishing club sent workers to pile more dirt on top of the dam to keep it from overflowing. The owners also ordered the workers to remove the screens, which had become jammed with fish, sticks, and other debris. The workers tried hard to clear the jam, but John Parke’s trained engineer’s eye could see that their efforts would be useless. Parke saddled a horse and began his ride through the valley warning people of the arriving floodwater.
    The rain continued to pour. At noon, the water washed over the top of the dam. Almost immediately a big notch developed in the top of the dike. Then, according to witnesses, the whole dam simply disappeared. One minute there was a dam, and the next minute —nothing. The lake moved into the valley like a living thing. In little more than half an hour, the dam emptied completely, sending 45 billion gallons of water down the valley toward Johnstown. A wave of water reaching 125 feet high raced toward the city, leaping forward at the rate of 22 feet per second.
    The huge wall of water approached East Conemaugh, a suburb of Johnstown. As it did, railroad engineer John Hess looked up from the string of freight cars his locomotive was pushing. He saw the water bearing down on him, now moving at 50 miles per hour. Hess moved the locomotive’s throttle to wide open. Still pushing a string of freight cars before him, he raced the advancing flood into East Conemaugh. Hess tied down the locomotive’s whistle, and its screaming blast preceded the train into the village. Johnstown was a railroad city. People in the whole Johnstown area knew that a tied-down whistle could only mean a disaster. And the already flooded streets told them what kind of disaster it was. Many people who had ignored earlier warnings now headed for the hills. Unable to reach the center of Johnstown, railroader Hess jumped from the locomotive cab in East Conemaugh, ran into his house, and roused his family. The Hesses made their way up the side of a hill just before the flood hit the village.
    As the great tumbling hill of water roared on toward the center of Johnstown, it ran into the East Conemaugh rail yard. In the yard was a roundhouse (机车库) containing 37 locomotives. The onrushing flood swept away both roundhouse and engines. The rush of waters was so forceful that it carried the locomotives, weighing 40 tons each, on top of the flood.
    The rolling mountain of water, now filled with locomotives, freight cars, houses, trees, horses, and humans, rushed on. A great cloud of dust and moisture rolled before the racing floodwaters. The dust cloud was so heavy that many residents of Johnstown never saw the rolling floodwaters behind it. The cloud was quickly named the death mist.
    The mountain of water continued its headlong rush. Just before it reached Johnstown, it destroyed the Gautier Wire Works.The buildings of the wire works and its hundreds of miles of flesh-piercing barbed wire were added to the swirling debris.
    The giant rolling hill of water rushed into the heart of Johnstown. The flood swept into two distinct parts like the arms of the letter Y. One arm of the flood roared through the residential part of town. Churches, schools, and houses gave way before its power; 800 homes were flushed away.
    The second arm of the flood, a rumbling mass of houses, trains, people, and animals, swept up to a stone bridge that spanned the valley. The debris caught in the bridge’s stone arches and became wedged there. A collection of hundreds of parts of buildings and thousands of residents became hopelessly bound in coils of barbed wire. The water formed a great swirling whirlpool behind them. Hundreds of additional people had approached the whirlpool on makeshift (临时代用的) rafts (木筏) made from pieces of wreckage. They leaped onto the swirling debris, joining the people already trapped there.
    Then a new horror broke out. Many stoves, their fires still burning floated into and ignited the mass of debris. Residents on the bridge overhead and on the nearby shore managed to rescue some people by reaching for them with long poles and ropes.Thousands of victims found themselves trapped between the still rising water and the flames. Some accounts of the flood claim that 200 people committed suicide by deliberately jumping into the flames. They were just a few of the 2,000 to 7,000 people believed to have lost their lives at Johnstown.
    A week after the flood, a demolition (爆破) expert placed nine 50-pound cases of dynamite in the debris and cleared the jam. The waters were free to pass under the bridge and continue the 75-mile trip down the valley to Pittsburgh. The people of that city made an astounding find. The floodwaters had carried a piece of wooden flooring from Johnstown to Pittsburgh. On that bit of wreckage, completely unhurt by the wild tide, was a healthy five-month-old baby.
The Johnstown flood is described as an example of a disaster that resulted from the combination of______and ______.
选项
答案too much rain / poor construction and management
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