Erie, Pennsylvania: The Wall of Water That Killed 36
On August 3, 1915, a wall of water tore through downtown Erie, Pennsylvania, at twenty-five miles per hour, destroying three hundred buildings and killing thirty-six to forty people in the city's deadliest disaster. The Mill Creek Flood wasn't an act of God—it was the predictable result of a choice made by a growing American city that buried a powerful creek beneath culverts and ignored repeated warnings.
For decades, Erie built over Mill Creek to maximize developable land, covering the nineteen-mile waterway with approximately twenty culverts through downtown. When 5.77 inches of rain fell in just hours, debris clogged a critical culvert at 26th and State Streets, creating a four-block reservoir. At 8:45 PM, the culvert gave way, unleashing a twenty-five-foot wall of water that destroyed everything in its three-mile path.
Tonight's episode explores how Erie learned from catastrophe, building the Mill Creek Tube—an engineering marvel that has protected the city for over a century. It's a story of tragedy, resilience, and the price of ignoring nature's power.
Show Notes:
On the night of August 3, 1915, downtown Erie, Pennsylvania, experienced its worst natural disaster when a twenty-five-foot wall of water tore through the city at twenty-five miles per hour. The Mill Creek Flood killed thirty-six to forty people, destroyed three hundred buildings, and left hundreds of families homeless. But this wasn't a random act of nature—it was the predictable result of decades of urban development that ignored the power of a nineteen-mile creek flowing through the heart of a growing industrial city.
The City That Buried Its Creek
By 1915, Erie had become known as the "Boiler and Engine Capital of the World," with factories lining Lake Erie's southern shore and a dense population of German, Irish, Polish, and Italian immigrant workers. As the city grew, officials made a choice common to American cities of that era: they buried Mill Creek beneath approximately twenty culverts and ten bridges, maximizing developable land downtown. The philosophy was simple—if you have a creek running through valuable real estate, you don't preserve it. You bury it.
Mill Creek itself had considerable power. With a steep gradient dropping two hundred feet over its nineteen-mile length and a compact thirteen-square-mile watershed, heavy rainfall funneled downstream fast. The creek had flooded before—in 1878 and 1893—but city officials assumed the culverts would be sufficient. They were wrong.
The Storm and the Breaking Point
On August 3, 1915, between 3 PM and 9 PM, a succession of storms unleashed 5.77 inches of rain over the Mill Creek watershed. As saturated soil collapsed along creek banks, debris swept downstream—trees, barns, chicken coops, outhouses—all funneling toward the narrow culvert at 26th and State Streets in downtown Erie.
For five hours, Fire Chief John McMahon and police officers tried to clear the debris blockage. They used dynamite. It didn't work. Behind the clogged culvert, an artificial lake formed—four city blocks flooded, water thirty feet deep in places.
At 8:45 PM, the culvert gave way.
What followed was catastrophic. A twenty-five-foot wall of water raced through downtown Erie at twenty-five miles per hour, destroying everything in a three-mile path. Houses were lifted from foundations and carried blocks away. Railcars and streetcars were knocked off their tracks. State Street businesses from 19th to 7th Streets suffered extensive damage. The floodwaters carried a horrifying mix—mud, building debris, twisted automobiles, tree trunks, cattle carcasses, and human remains.
Heroes and Victims
Fire Chief John McMahon became one of the flood's most tragic victims. While directing rescue efforts at East 23rd and French Streets, McMahon had just handed a blind woman through a window to safety when the house was swept away with him and three firefighters still on board. The men rode the roof for four blocks before it disintegrated. Firefighter John Donovan, 25, drowned trying to save McMahon. McMahon survived the night, trapped under twenty feet of debris until a woman heard his cries and alerted rescuers. But his injuries were severe, and seventeen days later, on August 20, 1915, he died from typhoid pneumonia contracted during his ordeal.
Erie historian Caroline Reichel remembers stories her father told her. He was twenty years old during the flood and witnessed the grim aftermath—bodies in the water, survivors trapped in trees, the complete destruction of entire neighborhoods. The flood's casualty reports varied between thirty-six and more than forty deaths, with property damage estimated between three and five million dollars in 1915 currency.
Engineering a Solution
Erie learned its lesson. Within a year, the city commissioned one of the most ambitious flood control projects of its era. Between 1917 and 1923, workers constructed the Mill Creek Tube—a reinforced concrete conduit twenty-two feet wide, nineteen feet tall, and 12,280 feet long (approximately 2.3 miles), running beneath downtown Erie from Glenwood Park Avenue to Presque Isle Bay.
The tube's design was revolutionary. It could handle 12,000 cubic feet per second of water flow—exceeding the estimated 11,000 cubic feet per second from the 1915 flood. At the southern entrance, engineers built a drift catcher—a 209-foot-long filtering structure designed to trap debris before it could enter the main tube. The Mill Creek Tube cost $1.9 million in 1920s dollars (approximately $450,000 paid by railway companies).
And it worked. Since the Mill Creek Tube's completion in 1923, Erie has not experienced another major flood from Mill Creek. Over one hundred years of protection. The tube remains operational today, carrying the creek silently beneath State Street and downtown Erie—a concrete memorial to the thirty-six to forty people who died teaching their city to respect the water.
Timeline of Events
August 3, 1915, 3:00 PM - Storms begin dumping rain over Erie area
August 3, 1915, 4:00-7:00 PM - Four inches of rain falls in three hours
August 3, 1915, 8:45 PM - Culvert at 26th and State Streets gives way, releasing wall of water
August 3, 1915, ~9:15 PM - Floodwaters complete three-mile path of destruction
August 4, 1915, Dawn - Erie residents discover scope of devastation
August 4, 1915 - Mayor W.J. Stern issues emergency proclamation
August 20, 1915 - Fire Chief John McMahon dies from typhoid pneumonia
1917 - Construction begins on Mill Creek Tube
1923 - Mill Creek Tube completed
2025 - Mill Creek Tube continues protecting Erie after 102 years
Historical Significance
The Mill Creek Flood stands as a watershed moment (pun intended) in American urban planning history. Erie's tragedy became a case study in how rapid industrialization and inadequate infrastructure planning can turn natural waterways into deadly hazards. The city's response—building the Mill Creek Tube—demonstrated that engineering solutions could successfully manage urban waterways when designed with respect for nature's power rather than attempts to simply bury it.
The disaster also highlighted the vulnerability of immigrant working-class communities in early twentieth-century American industrial cities. Many victims lived in dense housing near factories along the creek's path—families who had little choice about where they lived and even less influence over city planning decisions that prioritized development over safety.
Today, most Erie residents walk over the Mill Creek Tube without knowing it exists. The drift catcher at the Erie Zoo has become a landmark where generations of children cross on the miniature railroad, learning about the old flood that changed their city forever.
Sources & Additional Resources
This episode draws from verified historical sources and contemporary documentation of the Mill Creek Flood:
National Weather Service - Cleveland Office (weather.gov/cle) - Official meteorological analysis of the August 3, 1915 storm system, rainfall measurements (5.77 inches in six hours), and watershed hydrology data
Insurance Journal - 2015 Centennial Investigation (insurancejournal.com) - Comprehensive re-examination of the disaster published on the flood's 100th anniversary, featuring interviews with Erie historian Caroline Reichel and analysis of contemporary newspaper accounts
Erie County Historical Society / Hagen History Center (eriehistory.org) - Primary source documentation including Caroline Reichel's historical research, eyewitness accounts, photograph collections from the 1915 flood, and analysis of earlier flood events (1878, 1893)
Erie Daily Times - August 1915 Contemporary Coverage - Original newspaper reporting from the disaster, including Fire Chief John McMahon's firsthand account, Mayor W.J. Stern's emergency proclamations, casualty reports, and relief effort documentation
Engineering News-Record - June 1920 - Technical specifications and construction details of the Mill Creek Tube project, including engineering analysis, cost breakdowns, and design philosophy
Wikipedia - Mill Creek (Lake Erie) - Comprehensive overview of creek geography, watershed characteristics (19 miles long, 13 square mile drainage area), historical context, and technical details of the Mill Creek Tube
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[SPEAKER_00]: August 3, 1915, downtown Erie, Pennsylvania, 8.45 at night.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For the past five hours, an artificial lake has been growing in the middle of the city.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Four city blocks flooded, water, 30 feet deep in places, held back by a clogged couvert at 26th and state streets,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Fire Chief John McMan stands at the edge, watching the reservoir rise.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All day, police and firefighters have tried to clear the debris, blocking the covert.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They've used dynamite, it didn't work.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Behind the dam, millions of gallons of rainwater, keep accumulating.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What happens next unfolds at 25 miles per hour?
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[SPEAKER_00]: A 25 foot wall of water, ripping through downtown area, destroying everything in a three mile path.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back friend to hometown history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The podcast that takes a stroll down the main streets and back alleys of the past to uncover how local stories shaped the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters, tonight we're going to eerie Pennsylvania, August 3rd, 1915.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For the story of what happens when a city built over a creek ignores the warnings and faces a wall of water.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is the mill creek flood.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Eerie's deadliest disaster.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Before we get into the storm itself, I need to set the stage, because what happened in Eerie, on that August night, wasn't just bad luck or an act of God, it was the predictable result of a choice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A choice made by a growing American city in the early 1900s.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the choice to build over nature, instead of working with it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Mill Creek is a 19 mile waterway that flows through Eri Pensoveña, into Presque, Iowa Bay, on Lake Eri.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1915, about three miles of that creek, ran directly through downtown, and for decades, as the city grew, Eri had been building over the creek.
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[SPEAKER_00]: bearing it in culverts, covering it with streets and buildings, maximizing every square foot of developer land.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The problem culverts were great for normal water flow.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But when you get extreme rainfall and debris start to piling up at narrowing points, you don't have a drainage system anymore.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You have a bomb waiting to go off.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Erie had been warned.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1878, the Creek flooded.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1893, it flooded again.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But according to historian Caroline Rikkel, nothing prepared the city for what came in 1915.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Let me show you how it all fell apart.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Let's first talk about Erie in 1915.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is a booming industrial city on Lake Erie's southern shore.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They call it the boiler and engine capital of the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Factories line the waterfront.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yoratsuki manufacturing, level manufacturing, railroads connecting New York to Chicago.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The city's workforce is made up of German, Irish, Polish, and Italian immigrants, working class families living in dense housing, close to the factories.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The downtown district was laid out back in 1795, and a Manhattan-style grid.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Straight streets, perfect blocks, no consideration for the natural creek that ran right to the middle of it all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: State street is the main north-south corridor, connecting the bay to the interior.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Mill Creek itself was once Erie's economic lifeline.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The very first Mill in Erie County was built at the Creek's mouth, which is how it got its name.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By 1835, the Creek powered four grist mills and 13 saw mills.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's reliable flow and 200 foot elevation drop made it perfect for water power.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But here's the problem with Mill Creek.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It has a steep gradient and a compact watershed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When heavy rain falls on the 13 square miles of drainage area, all that water funnels downstream, fast, and the creek has considerable eros of power.
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[SPEAKER_00]: As Erie grew, the city did what most American cities did in this era.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They built over the waterway.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Approximately 20 callverts and 10 bridges Managed the creek's passage through downtown.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The philosophy was simple, maximize developer land.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You have a creek running through valuable real estate, you don't preserve it, you bury it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The critical structure was a culvert at 26th and state streets, where Mill Creek entered the densest part of downtown.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These culverts were sized for normal water flow, with modest margins for high water.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They couldn't handle the combination of extreme rainfall and debris.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When saturated soil along the creek banks collapsed during storms, trees, barns, chicken coops, outhouses, all of it swept downstream.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At narrow points, like the 26th street culvert, debris could create a complete blockage, a quirk, a bottle.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and on August 3, 1915, the Creek that Erie tried to control was about to remind them who was really in charge.
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[SPEAKER_00]: August 3rd, 1915, begins with thunderstorms rolling through northwestern Pennsylvania, around 330 in the afternoon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The rain is heavy, not unusual for an August storm.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But this one does it move on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It stalls over area.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Between 4 and 7pm, area receives 4 inches of rain in
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[SPEAKER_00]: According to the National Weather Services official analysis, a total of 5.77 inches fell in just 13 hours, with the most intense period hitting between 430 and 730pm.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's not record-breaking rainfall, but it's enough, more than enough, given areas geography.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Mill Creek starts swelling immediately.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All that water from the 13 square mile watershed funnels into the creek.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The steep gradient accelerates everything downstream.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By evening, the creek is carrying a massive volume of water, along with everything the saturated banks are releasing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Trees, debris, entire sections of farmland, who rode into the flow.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Around 5pm, the debris begins hitting the 26th street covert.
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[SPEAKER_00]: at first it's just branches and small debris passing through.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But as the storm intensifies, bigger material arrives, logs, fence posts, a chicken coop, part of someone's barn.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The culvert starts to clog.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By 7pm, the blockage is complete.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Water can't pass through.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine standing at 26th and stage streets, four city blocks are now under water, buildings flooded to their second stories.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The water is 30 feet deep in places, just sitting there, held back by a clogged covert that was never designed to handle this kind of pressure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: police and firefighters arrive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They can see what's happening.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This reservoir is growing, and if that callvert lets go, everything downstream is in the flood's path.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Fire Chief John McMan orders dynamite brought in.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If they can blast away some of the debris, maybe they can get the water flowing again.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Gradually, instead of catastrophically,
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[SPEAKER_00]: They place charges, detonate them, it doesn't work.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The debris is too compacted, the dynamite just shifts things around.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By 8 p.m., the reservoir covers four city blocks and continues rising.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Downtown Erie, below the culvert, goes about its Tuesday evening.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Stores are closing, families are having dinner.
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[SPEAKER_00]: People know it's raining hard, but Erie's seen rain before.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They don't know what's about to hit them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When the 26th Street Colvert gives way, it releases millions of gallons of accumulated rainwater all at once.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The wall of water is 25 feet high, it moves at 25 miles per hour, and it's carrying everything the reservoir collected.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Lumber, debris, parts of buildings, trees,
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[SPEAKER_00]: The flood rips through downtown eerie in a path three miles long and four to six blocks wide State street eerie's main commercial corridor takes the worst of it The water destroys everything in its path Three-story brick buildings collapse wooden structures disintegrate instantly Railroad tracks twist like ribbons
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[SPEAKER_00]: by all accounts the sound was terrifying.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Witnesses described it as a continuous roar, rushing water, crashing buildings, debris smashing into whatever stood in the way.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The flood carried massive logs that acted like battering rams, demolishing structures the water alone might have spared.
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[SPEAKER_00]: people had no warning.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The flood arrived too fast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some families were eating dinner when their homes collapsed around them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Others were in bed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A few were on the street and saw the wall of water coming.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But there was nowhere to go.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You can't outrun 25 miles per hour when you're knee deep in water and debris.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At East Seventh and Holland Streets, the Higgins family faced an impossible choice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: John Higgins, his wife, Winneffred, and their children, Marion H. Juan, and James H. 14 lived directly in the flood's path.
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[SPEAKER_00]: As waters rose, rescuers urge them to evacuate, but the baby was ill. Winneffred refused to leave her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When rescuers reached the house the next morning, all four had perished.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They found the one-year-old girl still collapsed in the arms of her dead mother.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Fire Chief John McMahon, the man who had been standing at the reservoir's edge, trying to prevent exactly this, was working rescue operations when he was swept into the flood waters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He survived the night, but he'd been exposed to contaminated water for hours.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One day later, John McMahon died of typhoid pneumonia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was 64 years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He'd served eerie for decades.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Firefighter John Donovan, at age 25, died the night of the flood, trying to rescue trapped residents.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Margaret Rose aged 68, drowned at 18th and French streets, unable to escape the rising water.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By midnight, the flood had passed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What was left was devastation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When the sun rose on August 4th, 1915, Erie faced the worst disaster in the city's history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The official death toll was never definitively settled.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sources report 36 to more than 40 lives lost.
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[SPEAKER_00]: 300 buildings destroyed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Entire neighborhoods wiped out.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The industrial district was devastated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: at your Ratsky Manufacturing, one of Erie's largest employers, flood waters tore through the factory complex, causing $50,000 in damage, level manufacturing sustained losses exceeding $100,000, downtown state street, Erie's commercial heart looked like a war zone, brick buildings reduced to rubble.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Streets buried under debris, the railroad tracks that connected area to the rest of the nation were twisted and broken.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Total property damage estimates ranged from two to five million dollars, a staggering sum in 1915 money.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But beyond the numbers, in the destroyed buildings, there were stories.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Families who lost everything they owned, children who lost parents, parents who lost children, entire blocks of working class housing, gone, businesses that have been family operations for generations, erased in a single night.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The response was immediate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Relief efforts began at dawn.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Red Cross arrived.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Neighboring towns sent supplies.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The state dispatched engineers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: According to historian Caroline Reichel, who's father was a child in Erie during the flood, the community's resilience was remarkable.
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[SPEAKER_00]: People helped each other dig out.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Businesses reopened in temporary locations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The city began clearing debris within days.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But everyone understood, cleaning up wasn't enough, Erie needed a permanent solution.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They couldn't let this happen again.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The question was, what kind of solution, how do you prevent a creek from flooding when that creek has 13 square miles of watershed in a steep gradient that makes it inherently dangerous during heavy rain?
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[SPEAKER_00]: The answer would take years to implement, but when it came, it would be one of the most ambitious engineering projects in Pennsylvania's history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On August 4, 1915, the morning after the flood, eerie mayor W. J. Stern issued an emergency proclamation, calling the disaster the worst in the city of eerie.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He convened city leaders and engineers to discuss relief efforts and long-term solutions
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[SPEAKER_00]: Two weeks later, city, county, state, and township authorities met again to discuss permanent flood prevention.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The answer would take years to implement, but when Miles Brown became mayor the following year, he made it his administration's top priority.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Working with city engineers, they designed an ambitious plan, built a massive underground call-vert system that could handle extreme rainfall without catastrophic failure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They called it the Mill Creek Tube.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what they built, a 2.3-mile underground call-vert system running from Glenwood Park Avenue, North, to Preskelle, Iolbeg.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The tube was large enough to handle not just normal creek flow, but the kind of extreme storm event that hit in 1915.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Re-enforced concrete construction, multiple access points for maintenance and debris removal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And at the southern end, they built something ingenious, a drift catcher, a filtering structure designed to trap debris, before it could enter the main tube and cause blockages.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Trees, logs, farm debris, all of it will be stopped at the drift catcher, where workers could remove it without threatening the entire system.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Construction began in 1917, and finished in 1923.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The cost was astronomical for the time period, but Erie considered it worth every penny.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And here's the remarkable thing, it worked.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Since the Mill Creek tube was completed in 1923, Erie has not experienced another major flood from Mill Creek, over 100 years of protection, through countless storms, through climate changes, through population growth and urban development, the tube has held.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The engineering solution that Erie implemented after the 1915 disaster became a model for other cities facing similar challenges with urban waterways.
18:54.400 --> 18:56.362
[SPEAKER_00]: You build bigger than you think you need.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You plan for the worst case scenario.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You don't just patch the problem, you engineer a solution that lasts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Today most area residents walk over the Mill Creek tube without knowing it's there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The creek flows silently beneath state street and downtown area, contained in its concrete channel, doing no harm.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Mill Creek flood of 1915 stands as a stark reminder of what happens when city's prioritized development over natural systems.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Eerie Mator Choice, Barry the Creek, Maximized Landchuse, assume the culverts would be enough for decades that choice seemed to work until it didn't.
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[SPEAKER_00]: 36 to 40 people paid with their lives.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds more lost their homes, their livelihoods, everything they owned.
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[SPEAKER_00]: 300 buildings destroyed in a single night because a city ignored the warnings and underestimated the power of water.
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[SPEAKER_00]: bit eerie learned.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Mill Creek tube wasn't just a patch job, it was a fundamental rethinking of how to live with a powerful waterway.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Built for the worst case, don't assume normal water conditions will always hold, respect the water, and for over a century it's worked.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Today, the Mill Creek flood is largely forgotten outside the area.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Most residents have no idea their city experienced one of Pennsylvania's deadliest flood disasters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's a small marker at the cemetery where some victims are buried.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The eerie zoos miniature railroad crosses the drift catcher.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's how many modern eerie kids first learn about the old creek.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the creek is still there, flowing beneath the city every single day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Safely contained in the tube that was built after 36 to 40 people paid the ultimate price for a lesson in urban planning.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The mill creek tube stands as both a memorial and a warning, a reminder that engineering can solve problems that nature presents, but only after we acknowledge that nature has power we cannot ignore.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Respect the water or pay the price.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Every hometown has a story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight, it's Eerie's Wall of Water.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A lesson written in concrete beneath the streets, protecting the living while honoring the dead, who taught us to respect the creek we tried to bury.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If this story moved you, share it with someone who cares about forgotten history, or someone who needs reminding that nature always wins when we
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[SPEAKER_00]: Good night, friend.
