[The following is took place during the sinking of the SS Eastland. Context for the disaster, courtesy of Wikipedia: “The SS Eastland was a passenger ship based in Chicago and used for tours. On July 24, 1915, the ship rolled over onto her side while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. A total of 844 passengers and crew were killed in what was the largest loss of life from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes.” Here, a nurse by the name of Helen Rapa was just down the street when the disaster happened. When she heard that the ship had capsized in the harbor, she ran out into the street and jumped onto an emergency vehicle that was heading for the carnage.]
The nurse pressed against the flow of survivors, who were just then shambling away from the fallen boat like waterlogged zombies, their ashen faces scanning the wharf as though unable to fully awaken from the nightmare. Repa pushed her way to the edge of the dock where she could see the torn piling lying bent and ragged near Clark Street, pointing like an accusatory finger toward the wreck. The ship lay roughly twenty feet away.
Ranks of people stood on the Eastland’s exposed hull, drenched and stunned and looking around, trying in vain to absorb the cataclysm. The noise on the water wrenched Nurse Repa’s attention away.
”I shall never be able to forget what I saw,” she later reported. “People were struggling in the water, clustered so thickly that they literally covered the surface of the river. A few were swimming; the rest were floundering about, some clinging to a life raft that had floated free, others clutching at anything they could reach – at bits of wood, at each other, grabbing each other, pulling each other down, and screaming! The screaming was the most horrible of all.”
Repa got to work immediately.
Source:
Bonansinga, Jay R. “Chapter Eight – Down and Down.” The Sinking of the Eastland: America's Forgotten Tragedy. Citadel Press, 2005. 88. Print.
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