On May 31, the headwaters of the West Branch [of the Susquehanna River] were running twelve feet deeper than ever before.
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Everywhere on that day the rain is described as coming down not in drops, but in "sheets," in "cloudbursts," in "masses." (McMaster 211)
(some indefinable object: May 30, Johnstown; "The cloud looked square-shaped, like a house with its lower portion surrounded by a white cloud looking like steam, which seemed to rise from all around the main dark cloud," May 28, Kansas)
The mountain top is a broad plane and had never, within the recollection of any man, been visited by such a storm as that of the night of May 30th. (McMaster 222)*
*The nature of the Great Storm of 1889 is amply attested by the vivid descriptions of those who experienced it in Kansas and in Cambria County, and by the record evidence of its effects. I unnecessarily qualify the following with, “I did not experience the Great Storm personally, and; I am not a meteorologist, either professional or amateur":
In my sixty-six years of life, including twenty-some in Western Pennsylvania, which included seeing personally the effects of the "Storm of the Century" that caused the Johnstown Flood of 1977; in addition, experiencing first-hand six months later the Great Blizzard of 1978 in Boston; and in addition, having read a normal amount over the course of a life of comparable years of other storms in the news, the behavior of this storm is unique. I am unaware of any other storm that made such strange sensory impressions on people who experienced it, that was of such maniacal and enduring ferocity, and which formed over and visited its violence upon a landmass of an entire continent. The water deposited on Cambria County by this unique storm was added to the 20,000,000 tons of water ineffectually held back by a derelict earthen dam in Lake Conemaugh. -BH
