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1889

The Dam the Millionaires Let Rot: Johnstown, 1889

In ten minutes, a lake dropped on a city. The dam that failed belonged to a private club for America's richest men — and they'd been warned.

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It took about ten minutes to erase four square miles of a Pennsylvania steel town. The water that did it had been sitting fourteen miles uphill for years, held back by an earthen dam that the men who owned it could not be bothered to fix.

The lake on the mountain

Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a hard, prosperous place in 1889 — a valley town of some 30,000 people, packed tight between steep hills where the Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek rivers met. It made steel and barbed wire and lived with regular spring flooding. What it did not know, in any way that mattered, was how much trouble was perched above it.

Fourteen miles upstream sat the South Fork Dam, the largest earthen dam in the country, holding back Lake Conemaugh — at the time one of the largest man-made lakes in America, well over 5 billion gallons of water. The lake and dam belonged to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, an exclusive retreat for Pittsburgh's elite. Its members included Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon — men who could buy almost anything except, apparently, a properly maintained dam.

To make the grounds pleasant, the club had altered the structure for its own convenience. Previous owners had lowered the dam to widen the road across its crest, and the club installed screens across the spillway to keep its stocked fish from escaping — screens that would later choke with debris when the rains came. Engineers had warned that the dam was unsound. The warnings went unheeded.

Thirty minutes of warning

Late May 1889 brought a punishing storm. Six to ten inches of rain fell over the region, and Lake Conemaugh rose to the top of the dam. Workers labored desperately through the morning of May 31 to save it, trying to clear the clogged spillway and raise the embankment. It was not enough.

At roughly 3:10 in the afternoon, the South Fork Dam gave way. An estimated 20 million tons of water — the entire lake — burst loose and tore down the narrow valley toward Johnstown, gaining speed as the walls of the gorge funneled it forward. It moved at 20 to 40 miles per hour, scouring away everything it touched and growing into a churning wall of water, trees, houses, locomotives, and rail cars.

At 4:07 p.m., that wall — by many accounts roughly 36 feet high — struck Johnstown. The town disappeared in minutes.

The fire on the water

The horror did not end with drowning. Much of the wreckage carried downstream — splintered homes, freight cars, miles of barbed wire, and the people tangled in it — slammed into the Pennsylvania Railroad's massive Stone Bridge at the lower end of town and jammed there in a mass that covered some 30 acres.

Then it caught fire. Sparked likely by overturned stoves and ruptured gas lines, the debris field at the Stone Bridge burned through the night. Survivors who had ridden the flood to the bridge, and others pinned in the wreckage, could not escape the flames. Dozens of people who had lived through the water died in the fire. From the surrounding hillsides, the living watched and listened, unable to reach them.

When the water finally receded, the official death toll was set at 2,209 — though the true number was almost certainly higher, with many bodies never identified or recovered. It remains one of the deadliest disasters in American history. Bodies were found for years afterward; some were carried as far as Cincinnati.

A nation responds, the club does not

The Johnstown Flood became one of the first great American relief efforts of the modern age. Clara Barton, then 67, arrived on June 5 with workers from the American Red Cross — the organization's first major peacetime disaster response. She stayed roughly five months, organizing shelter and supplies and overseeing the construction of warehouses and temporary "Red Cross hotels" for the homeless. The effort made her a national figure and cemented the young Red Cross in the American imagination.

The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club fared rather better than its victims. Survivors sued, but courts treated the disaster as an act of God rather than negligence, and the club was never held legally responsible. Its wealthy members made some private charitable contributions and quietly moved on. No member ever paid a legal penalty for the dam they had let decay.

The water came from a lake built for the pleasure of men who never had to live beneath it — a reminder that disasters are rarely as natural as the powerful would like us to believe.

Sources

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