Floods

Throughout Central and Northwestern Europe the most disastrous floods of recent times swept away numberless villages and inundated portions of almost every city located near a river of any consequence. Ironically enough the cause of this international disaster was a period of warm rains and almost balmy weather which set in on Christmas night. By New Year's Day the great watersheds of Europe foamed and thundered with torrents of melting snow, which ordinarily pass harmlessly away during the long European spring. Telegraphers, working night and day over the few lines that were not down, flooded the dry portions of the earth with news of the aqueous catastrophe:

The British Isles. Gales and floods laid thousands of acres of land under water to the hedge tops. In England the Thames overflowed disastrously at Windsor and notably throughout its entire valley. A cyclone passed over Western Scotland, and the Clyde overflowed at Glasgow. Only a single telegraph line was working out of Dublin, and at London, Edinburgh and Glasgow all overhead telephone lines were down. The cross-channel packets were buffeted by 40-foot waves.

France. The Seine rose to within 18 inches of the high water record of 1910, at Troyes; but at Paris only the suburbs had been flooded late in the week. The Marne, Loire, Rhone, Oise, Cher, etc., overflowed with variously disastrous results.. The Orne caused damages running into millions of francs and one death at Caen, the so called "Intellectual Capital of Normandy."

Germany. At Cologne the Rhine reached the highest flood mark in a century, 30 feet 4 inches above normal, and ferries always kept in reserve were totally unable to cope with the utter breakdown of transportation. The onetime U. S. Army of Occupation Headquarters at Coblentz was inundated by 20 feet of water. The statue of Wilhelm der Zweite atop the great Hohenzollern Bridge over the Rhine looked out upon a seemingly limitless dirt-yellow sea, which churned over vast areas of the Rhine valley.

Hungary. An ice jam three miles wide and as high as a six-story building piled up in the Theiss River. The Hungarian army expended three-fourths of the stock of ammunition allowed to it under existing treaties in a vain effort to shoot up this veritable iceberg, which caused the famed Tokay wine region to suffer a flood loss of ten billion crowns ($100,000). Angry Hungarians ran about shrieking that the Roumanian Government had aggravated the floods by opening certain sluice gates in violation of the Treaty of the Trianon.

Roumania. At least 50 persons lost their lives in the Roumanian floods. At Keresztes five women fled to the roof of a house which presently burst into flames because of the overturning of a stove. To escape being roasted alive, they leaped into the flood, which surged up to the second story, and were drowned. Scores of houses were swept away in the Torda district.

Belgium. The Meuse overflowed at Liege with an attendant property damage greater than that caused by the German bombardment during the War. Train service throughout central Belgium was paralyzed for days, and the flax harvest partly swept away by the flooding of the Lys. King Albert personally directed the emergency measures taken to abate the Meuse valley floods. At Marchienne a motorboat funeral procession was observed.

The Netherlands. Queen Wilhelmina, the Prince Consort and Premier Colijn toured the flooded districts in a motorboat followed by a second boat loaded with provisions for distribution to marooned sufferers. The floods in the valleys of the Lek and Waal were described as -"catastrophic." Numberless fresh water dykes burst. The enormous hydro-electric pumps installed against just such an emergency were barely able to save the country from irretrievable damage.