The Johnstown Flood

The rain started on May thirtieth, eighteen eighty-nine, and did not stop for two days. It fell across the Allegheny Mountains with unusual intensity, filling the creeks and streams that drained into the Little Conemaugh River. Fourteen miles upstream from the industrial city of Johnstown, a private club maintained a dam across the South Fork Creek.

The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, its members included Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon, had converted the old reservoir into a private lake for their summer retreat. Engineers had warned for years that the dam was inadequate and poorly maintained. On May thirty-first, at three fourteen in the afternoon, the dam gave way.

Twenty million tons of water descended the valley at roughly forty miles per hour, carrying with it the debris of every farm, bridge, and building it had passed. The wave reached Johnstown, a city of some thirty thousand people, in less than an hour. It was sixty feet tall in places.

It swept across the downtown, piled debris thirty feet deep against a stone railroad viaduct at the edge of the city, and set that debris on fire. More than two thousand two hundred people died. Some estimates place the number higher.

Bodies were recovered as far away as Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Among the dead were whole families, parents and children found together, or identified only months later. Johnstown had the highest concentration of casualties from a single event of any American city before or since.

The South Fork Club members faced no criminal charges and no successful civil lawsuits, protected by the legal doctrine of act of God. Clara Barton arrived with the American Red Cross, it was one of the organization's first major disaster responses. The national outpouring of grief and aid was enormous.

The legal impunity of the men who owned the dam was nearly as large a story. Pennsylvania rebuilt Johnstown. It flooded again, seriously, in nineteen thirty-six and in nineteen seventy-seven.

The valley holds its history in layers.