![]() Then the horror sunk in as they realized hundreds of bodies lay amid the debris or were buried below it. When the water receded, the damage was tallied: more than 600 homes washed away 2,000 railway freight and passenger cars scattered like toys or smashed to kindling railroad track, businesses, chunks of streets and vehicles swept from downtown Pueblo, according to the National Weather Service and other historical sources.Īs daylight dawned on June 4, survivors were numbed by the vast wreckage. The Arkansas River valley was flooded to the Colorado-Kansas state line. And many bodies found in the mud and wreckage could not be identified. Estimates of the death toll range wildly, but most sources agree that it likely surpassed 1,000, making it Colorado’s deadliest disaster. Indeed, the Coal and Iron Company in 1901 established a Sociological Department to assist its immigrant workers and their families with English classes and other civic education.īut many of the workers were young men who came alone with the promise of jobs and dreams of striking it rich in the western United States.įor some, those dreams ended the evening of June 3, 1921, when a 24-foot wall of water fed by torrential rain along the Front Range slammed through the narrow Arkansas River channel in downtown Pueblo. Some 40 languages were spoken in the plant and the town had 20 foreign-language newspapers, said Lucille Corsentino, chair of the board of the Roselawn 1891 Foundation. The company later would become Colorado Fuel & Iron, or CF&I. In 1921, Pueblo was home to about 50,000 people, many of them immigrants drawn to jobs with the Colorado Coal and Iron Company founded in 1881 as an affiliate of the Denver & Rio Grande Railway Company. For Pueblo, the ceremonies bracketed the ongoing tension between renewal and memory, fully embracing ongoing rebirth while never forgetting the city’s greatest loss.
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