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Morning Appeal Domestic News June 5, 1889
Carson City, Ormsby, Nevada
What is this article about?
At Johnstown on June 3, reports described the South Fork dam breaking the previous Friday; the lake emptied in an hour, sweeping the South Fork valley.
Quality green show the numbers
Measured from the scan
— how cleanly the OCR engine read the characters
- Mean ink quality
- 99.0% The length-weighted average confidence across the OCR lines — the mean of exactly the per-line scores whose tails the two figures below report. Typical is 99%.
- Illegible ink
- 0.0% Text sitting in OCR-detected lines that scored below 80% confidence — very shaky reads. Weighted by line length, so one long bad line counts for more than a short one.
- Uncertain ink
- 2.3% Text in lines that scored 80–90% — somewhat shaky reads.
- Matches source
- 98.85% How closely the served text matches the raw OCR of the same boxes, letter by letter, after collapsing spacing and case. This measures agreement, not correctness: the OCR is often wrong and the extractor corrects it, so 100% does not mean perfect, and a low figure usually means poor scan text was rewritten rather than that text was lost (length vs source shows loss).
- Length vs source
- 99.51% Below 100% means text was dropped from the OCR; above means text was added to make it read.
Assembled by the extraction model
— whether the stitched-together text holds up; catches layout and segmentation errors, which the scores above cannot see
- Transcription confidence
- 96.0% (typical 96%) How cleanly the extractor could assemble what it was given. Low here with clean ink scores points at layout analysis — the characters were read correctly but grouped or ordered wrongly.
- Comprehension
- 95.0% Whether the piece reads coherently start to finish. Can stay high while transcription confidence drops, when only part of the component is affected.
Clipping
Full Text
ORIGIN OF THE ACCIDENT
Nearly Ten Billion Gallons Flow Out in an Hour
Johnstown, June 3.—At 11:20 this morning four gentlemen, relatives of members of the South Fork Fishing Club, who had come to learn the fate of their friends at the lake, returned. They report no one at the lake except the custodians and some workmen.
The dam broke in the center at 3 o’clock on Friday afternoon. At 4 the lake was dry, that great body of water having passed out in an hour.
An effort was made to avert the disaster by digging a sluiceway on the dam, but without avail.
The water passed over the dam about one foot above its top, beginning at 2:30.
Whatever happened in the way of a cloudburst took place during the night. There had been but little rain up to dark, and by the morning, when the workmen woke, the lake was full and kept on rising, until at 2 o’clock it began pouring over the dam and undermining it.
Men were sent three or four times during the day to warn the people below.
When the final break came it was like tremendous continued peals of thunder.
Trees, rocks and earth shot into mid air in great columns, and then the wave started down the ravine.
The whole South Fork was swept, with not a tree standing.
Nearly Ten Billion Gallons Flow Out in an Hour
Johnstown, June 3.—At 11:20 this morning four gentlemen, relatives of members of the South Fork Fishing Club, who had come to learn the fate of their friends at the lake, returned. They report no one at the lake except the custodians and some workmen.
The dam broke in the center at 3 o’clock on Friday afternoon. At 4 the lake was dry, that great body of water having passed out in an hour.
An effort was made to avert the disaster by digging a sluiceway on the dam, but without avail.
The water passed over the dam about one foot above its top, beginning at 2:30.
Whatever happened in the way of a cloudburst took place during the night. There had been but little rain up to dark, and by the morning, when the workmen woke, the lake was full and kept on rising, until at 2 o’clock it began pouring over the dam and undermining it.
Men were sent three or four times during the day to warn the people below.
When the final break came it was like tremendous continued peals of thunder.
Trees, rocks and earth shot into mid air in great columns, and then the wave started down the ravine.
The whole South Fork was swept, with not a tree standing.
What sub-type of article is it?
Disaster
Infrastructure
Weather
What keywords are associated?
Johnstown Flood
South Fork Dam
Dam Break
Cloudburst
South Fork
Where did it happen?
Johnstown, Pennsylvania
Domestic News Details
Primary Location
Johnstown, Pennsylvania
Event Date
June 3; Dam Broke Friday Afternoon
Outcome
south fork valley swept clean of trees; lake emptied in about an hour; no death toll given in this account.