![]() ![]() A mountain of water approximately 45 feet high thundered down the valley and Johnstown was doomed. The people of Johnstown were in constant fear that the dam would break and when the huge rain storm of May 30 struck the area, their fears became reality. The club had dammed the area on the mountain to create a large lake for their recreational pleasure and repairs were done periodically as the dam was not structurally sound. Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a steel town, was located in a valley fourteen miles below an earthen dam erected by the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, a private retreat for the wealthy from nearby Pittsburgh. My favorite historian, David McCullough, provides a complete description of the event, beginning with the biggest storm in the area's history on May 30 to the aftermath which took years of recovery. These are just a few of the horrific statistics resultant from the Johnstown Flood of which is one of the most devastating natural disasters in American history. I highly recommend both,) does an excellent job of recreating the scene, dredging up the past and hosing it off to look, smell, sound and feel as fresh and as horrid as the day it happened. McCullough, who excels at these history snippets (See, this and his 1776 for proof. The event is fading into memory as time passes and other tragedies occur. These days your average joe would be hard pressed to give correct details on the Johnstown Flood. It posits hypotheticals, wondering aloud all the what-ifs the public has been asking. The book on the whole reads like a newspaper feature article or Op-Ed piece that comes out a few weeks after a contentious event where more questions than answers arise after the dust settles. This horror probably wouldn't have happened if not for a "let them eat cake" attitude by an elite few who wanted to maintain their Summer-fun pleasure palaces on a dammed lake perched precariously above a small town in a narrow valley below. In The Johnstown Flood, David McCullough gives you all as well as the heart and soul of this heinous catastrophe.īehind the numbers and stats, and even the human tragedy, there is an evil lurking here. With a volumetric flow rate that temporarily equalled that of the Mississippi River, the flood killed 2,209 people and caused US$17 million of damage (the equivalent of about $425 million in 2012 dollars)." - Wikipedia. gallons 18.2 million cubic meters 18.2 billion litres) from the reservoir known as Lake Conemaugh. ![]() The dam's failure unleashed a torrent of 20 million tons of water (4.8 billion U.S. It was the result of the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam situated on the Little Conemaugh River 14 miles (23 km) upstream of the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, USA, made worse by several days of extremely heavy rainfall. "The Johnstown Flood (or Great Flood of 1889 as it became known locally) occurred on May 31, 1889. It also offers a powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the danger of assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they are necessarily behaving responsibly. ![]() Graced by David McCullough's remarkable gift for writing richly textured, sympathetic social history, The Johnstown Flood is an absorbing, classic portrait of life in nineteenth-century America, of overweening confidence, of energy, and of tragedy. It was a tragedy that became a national scandal. Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain, smashing through Johnstown, and killing more than 2,000 people. Despite repeated warnings of possible danger, nothing was done about the dam. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. ![]()
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