There’s a man came from the lake

From The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough. Page 93.

The operator at South Fork that Friday morning was Miss Emma Ehrenfeld. She had come on duty at seven o’clock. It was about noon, she would later estimate, that a man came up into the tower “very much excited.”

“Notify Johnstown right away about the dam,” he said. “It’s raising very fast and there’s danger of the reservoir breaking.”

“Who told you all this?” she asked.

“There’s a man came from the lake,” he said.

Emma was not quite sure how much to believe of his story. She had seen the man around town and thought his name was Wertzengreist, though she was uncertain about that too. But she said later, “He is a man that people generally don’t have much confidence in, and for that reason, I scarcely knew what to do under the circumstances.”

She was also hampered by the fact that her lines west were open only as far as the next tower, four miles down the river at Mineral Point. Beyond Mineral Point there seemed to be a break somewhere and so she had no direct contact with Johnstown.

The operator at Mineral Point, W. H. Pickerell, was an old hand along the Little Conemaugh, having been there at that same tower for some fifteen years. Emma decided to “talk” it over with him on the one good wire she had. She tapped out her problem and waited for an answer. Pickerell told her that the break to the west was caused by the poles falling into the river, and that though he had no way of getting Johnstown, he thought “it was a thing that there oughtn’t to be any risks taken on.” He said he would take the message and send it on to East Conemaugh by foot if someone should happen along the tracks below his tower.

So the two of them worked out a message addressed to the yardmaster at Conemaugh and to Robert Pitcairn in Pittsburgh.

“I wrote the message up,” Pickerell declared weeks after, “and repeated it to her and asked her if that would do, and she said that was splendid—to send it that way. I doubled the message and waited and waited.”