Потоп 1897 года: разрушение плотины Мельзинга унесло жизни семи человек в Биконе

William Reilly couldn’t sleep. It had rained for days. Around midnight, the brickyard worker climbed out of bed for a smoke. He was just drifting back as he heard some men in his boardinghouse talking about a reservoir in the mountains above them. He got up to ask them about it. A freight train came pounding down the tracks. Reilly then heard an even more enormous roar. In 1886, the Fishkill and Matteawan Water Company built a pair of dams on a stream just south of the twin villages that would later be consolidated into the city of Beacon. The so-called “rip rap” dams were constructed mostly out of earth. Early on July 14, 1897, the Melzingah dams gave way—first the larger upper one, then the lower. A 15-foot-tall wall of water tore through a steep, craggy ravine, “moving with resistless force,” as The New York Times put it, ripping out trees by the roots, dragging 10-ton boulders hundreds of feet as if they were pebbles. At the bottom lay a small collection of tenements and Reilly’s boardinghouse, where employees of a nearby brick factory had grown alarmed by the heavy rain. The water came in two bursts. Some heard the first and rushed to safety. The water slammed into the boardinghouse, lifted it off its foundations, and floated it toward the Hudson. Aboard the southbound train, a sharp-eyed engineer acted quickly to accelerate—“and thus escaped being swept into the river,” The Times reported. A brickyard employee flagged down an express train that was approaching the washed-out tracks, avoiding a worse disaster. By daybreak, hundreds of locals gathered at the scene. Volunteers, including Reilly, worked to pull bodies from the wreckage. Seven people drowned, including the 36-year-old wife of the brickyard’s engineer, who had previously survived the Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania, which killed more than 2,000 people. Two of her children died as well. Early on July 14, 1897, a 15-foot-tall wall of water tore through a steep, craggy ravine, ripping out trees by the roots. Conversation in the crowd quickly turned to blame. “I have been afraid of the reservoir for years,” one local said. “People have been predicting its collapse ever since I lived here,” another added. A jury found the water company negligent in its care of the dams. In 1924, the Upper Melzingah Dam was rebuilt with concrete. The state of New York recently gave Beacon a $2 million grant to cover half the cost of strengthening the century-old dam against severe weather events like the 2023 storm that wreaked havoc across the region after eight inches of rain fell in a short period—the same amount that triggered the disaster of 1897. A local resident recently gifted the Beacon Historical Society an original typescript of testimony given to the jury charged with investigating the deadly Melzingah Dam collapse. Perusing the invaluable document, I got chills reading Reilly’s description of the moment he pulled the body of a young girl from the floodwaters while her parents wept and wailed on the shore. Related: This Fishkill Church Played a Key Role in America’s Founding