December 10, 2012 • 21 mins
On May 31, 1889, the South Fork dam gave way, sending 20 million tons of water rushing toward Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The water swept up everything in its path, and it only took about 10 minutes to wash away Johnstown. But was nature solely to blame?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from housework
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Debline
and chocolate Boarding. And And depending on where you live,
you've probably gotten used to the threat of a particular
type of natural disaster. I remember where I grew up,
(00:23):
it was always tornadoes that people were afraid of and
that came through the area a lot. And when I
lived on the Gulf Coast, it was hurricanes, of course.
And for the thirty thousand people who lived in Johnstown,
Pennsylvania in eight nine, what they had gotten used to
dealing with was floods. Yeah. Located in a floodplain at
the confluence of two rivers, Johnstown flooded really frequently, so
(00:46):
it was pretty common to see water in the streets,
and locals had gotten used to moving their valuables and
themselves to the upper floors of their homes when the
floodwater started to roll it. They had kind of a
routine exactly with it. But on May thirty first, eight
eighty nine, a flood of such magnitude hit the town
that even those who were holed up in their homes
upper levels weren't ready for it. It's been called one
(01:09):
of the worst disasters in American history, and nobody in
Johnstown really saw it coming. So that's partially because there
was more to this natural disaster than just nature, and
that's part of what we're going to take a look
at today. First, though, we're gonna paint a little picture
of Johnstown for you so you can understand why it
flooded so frequently in the first place, and then just
(01:30):
what kind of community it was at the time too.
So nineteenth century Johnstown was a busy industrial town in
southwestern Pennsylvania, and according to an article by Amy Lynn
Brown in National Parks, entrepreneurs had not too long before
turned it into a larger industrial sort of production area
(01:52):
of steel and iron um, and not long before that
it had just been this small rural community. So a
real dramatic change for Johnstown, and it had a burgeoning
working class community that lived there too. The town itself
was kind of hemmed in by the Little Conema and
the Stony Creek rivers, which ran along the edges of
Johnstown and then merged on the town's western end to
(02:15):
form the Connema River. These rivers flooded the town at
least once every year, and there were a couple of
reasons for that, a couple of possible I guess instigators
for the flooding. Flooding causes right. One was snow melting
and draining from the nearby Allegheny Mountains into the rivers
in the springtime specifically, which would cause the rivers to overflow.
(02:35):
And then of course at any time of year heavy
rain could also cause flooding flood the river. So those
were the natural surroundings of the town. But there was
also a man made body of water that was nearby.
It was fourteen miles up the Little Connuma River, and
it was called Lake Conuma, although I don't think of
it as as some sort of natural lake. It was
(02:56):
originally called the Western Reservoir, and it had originally been
created to supply water for the Pennsylvania Canal that went
between Johnstown and Pittsburgh, but the canal system became obsolete
not long after the reservoir project was complete, so not
having anything to do with this large body of water,
(03:17):
the reservoir was sold and had a few different owners
before it was finally sold to the South Fork Fishing
and Hunting Club in eighteen seventy nine. The club made
this former reservoir into a bit of a ritzy social
affair almost it did, uh, And it was a organization
to which many prominent Pennsylvanians belonged, including big names like
(03:41):
Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. And members
would go to this club to kind of escape the
industrial environs of Pittsburgh and enjoy things like fishing, sailing,
even musical performances. And it was the club that renamed
the reservoir Lake Knema. Just an important not to make here,
the dam that kept Lake Konuma contained, the South Fork
(04:04):
Dam was essentially made of packed dirt and rocks, and
it had not been kept up properly for a number
of years by the time it came into the club's
possession well, and most disturbingly, somebody had even taken out
the damn's drainage pipes that at some point in order
to sell them for scraps, So there wasn't any way
to drain their reservoir in order to make repair. So
(04:27):
even if you had wanted to repair the damn, you
would not have been able to. According to the Johnstown
Flood Museum, when the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club
took over it started maintaining the dam a little bit better,
but they also made some changes to it that made
it even less safe. For example, they added some screens
across the spillway to keep the expensive game fish that
(04:48):
they had stocked the lake with from escaping, and this
prevented the skill away from draining the lake's overflow. They
also made the damn a couple feet lower so that
two carriages could pass over it at the same time.
So this is we've painted a picture of of what
the situation was like uh in May of eighteen eighty nine,
and from a weather standpoint, that spring had been rather unique,
(05:10):
according to an article by Emily Lorditch and weatherwise, a
series of storms had led to record breaking rainfall that year,
So we're getting the perfect storm here. As you can tell.
On May thirty one, the residents of Johnstown were experiencing
a particularly heavy storm and Brown rights that rain was
falling at a rate of an inch per hour and
(05:33):
rivers were running six to seven ft above normal levels.
By afternoon, the streets in town were already flooding, so
people were going through their their normal routine when there
was a flood head up to the upper floors, ride
out the storm, you know, put some of your belongings upstairs. Again,
just a very typical sort of scene for Johnstown. What
(05:55):
they didn't know is that fourteen miles up at Lake Knema,
a scene was taken place that was entirely unprecedented. The
depth of the water of the four fifty acre lake
was sixty ft near the dam, and officials at the
club had been watching that level continued to rise during
this storm with great concern. Of course, the morning of
(06:16):
May thirty one, they were so worried about the dam
collapsing that they actually started to think about taking action.
And I mean people in Johnstown, just another aside here
had sort of known that the dam failing and the
dam breaking down was a possibility because of the condition
of the dam, and some people even joked about it.
And this kind of reminds me of when you do
live in an area where a certain type of natural
(06:38):
disaster sort of prevalent. Like I remember living on the
coast and when hurricanes would come, there were always people
who just sort of didn't really take it seriously. Yeah, exactly.
There's always that contingent of people, I think, but in
this case, When the people at the club saw what
was happening, they did try to take a few steps,
as I said, for to keep the dam from failing.
(06:58):
They for example, added dirt to the top. They also
dug a second spill away to relieve the pressure, and
they removed the screens that kept the stocked fish from escaping.
But it was too late. It was too late. At
this point, nothing they did was able to help in
At about three pm that day, people at the club
and in the nearby community of South Fork watched in
(07:21):
shock as the damn quote just moved away, sending twenty
million tons of water barreling down the valley. Of course,
headed right towards Johnstown in just a matter of minutes,
and according to Gene Allen's book Floods, the club wasn't
completely They were trying to take efforts to to save
(07:42):
the dam, but there was also a warning sent out.
I mean, a couple of guys had ridden through town
earlier shouting warnings that the dam was about to fail,
but people didn't really listen. I mean, like you were
just talking about there's kind of a an almost joke
like maybe the dam will fail, but people didn't really
think that was going to happen within an hour of
the damn failing, though, that twenty million tons of water
(08:04):
finally did reach Johnstown. It was traveling at speeds of
anywhere from twenty to forty miles per hour, and by
the time it reached the town it was said to
have had as much force as Niagara Falls, which is
just a stunning comparison to me. When it created a
tidal wave too, it did. It was a tidal wave
of water that was forty ft high and carried all
(08:26):
sorts of debris with it by the time it hit Johnstown,
including industrial and farm debris, houses, barns, animals, even people
both dead and alive. The townspeople were totally blindsided by this.
Some people only heard a thunder like sound as the
wave approached. Apparently it only took ten minutes basically to
wash the entire town away. Yeah, and and really the
(08:48):
entire town was washed away. Trains, entire homes just swept
up in the waves. So of course people we were
swept up in it too. Some of course, drowned right
away and the flood rushing water. Others were killed or
injured by the debris that was in the water. A
lot of people, and this is maybe one of the
more horrifying aspects of the flood. So a lot of people,
(09:10):
about three hundred to four hundred ended up surviving initially
but then getting swept away by the rushing water and
getting trapped up against this large stone bridge that was
owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. And this bridge was
actually blocking a lot of the stuff that was rushing
through the town, you know, box cars, barbed wire, big
chunks of homes, dead animals, creating this this log jam. Essentially,
(09:35):
all the debris though clogging the bridge eventually did catch
fire and the people trapped against the bridge, of course,
died at that point. Again, just one of the most
horrifying aspects of this already horrifying story. Ultimately, though, about
two thousand, two hundred nine people died in this disaster,
(09:56):
And just to give you a sense of what those
numbers mean for a town of Johnstown size, it's something
like one out of every ten people in the town.
Seven seventy of the victims were never identified. And the
number that Sarah just put out about the number of
people total who died, that included nine entire families, six
(10:18):
hundred homes, were destroyed and seventeen million dollars in property
damage was done. So that was just to give you
an idea of the toll that this disaster took. Some people, however,
did survive by writing out the flood in their homes
or in the upper stories of other buildings in town.
Others took a crazy ride down the Connema River and
(10:41):
were later rescued somewhere downstream, which is just wild to me.
I mean, I know, I just said it's crazy, and
then I said it's wild, so I said that twice.
But I have nothing to to add to that. It's
it's hard to imagine being actually carried alive barns then
dead animals going along with you. But as you can imagine,
I there of those survival scenarios were pretty harrowing, and
(11:04):
there are fortunately a lot of examples though, a lot
of records from the flood, so we're able to see
what it was like for people and how they managed
to survive. And one story that gets retold a lot
is the story of a six year old girl named
Gertrude Quinn Slatterly, who was swept away by floodwaters while
she was hanging onto this muddy mattress as a kind
(11:26):
of raft, and as she recalled, she was terrified. She
was calling out for someone to help her, and this
man dove into the water to to save her. He
made his way over to her onto the mattress, lifted
her up, and she later wrote of the experience quote,
I put both arms around his neck and held onto
him like grim death. Together we went down the stream
(11:49):
and um Miraculously. They eventually reached this white building where
men were leaning out the window trying to nab people
as they came by, rescuing people. And the rest you
are through Gertrude through the air. Some people later said
it was as much as fifteen to twenty feet through
the air uh to to safety for the other guys
(12:10):
to be able to catch her. Another woman, Anna fn Maxwell,
was in her home with her seven children when the
flood hit. She survived, but unfortunately her kids weren't so lucky.
The Johnstown Flood Museum actually shares how she described the scene,
and it's pretty sad, she said. Quote The water rose
and floated us until our heads nearly touched the ceiling.
(12:31):
It was dark and the house was tossing every way.
The air was stifling and I could not tell just
the moment the rest of the children had to give
up and drown. What I suffered with the bodies of
my seven children floating around me and the gloom can
never be told. Yeah. So pretty powerful story. And the
Johnstown Flood Museum's website shares several survival stories like this.
(12:55):
UM some are more uplifting than others. Of course, UM
in some cases too, we should say entire families did survive,
But it seems like you would have had to have
been very lucky, and all your family members would have
had to have been quite lucky for that to be
the case. One thing that is remarkable about the flood, though,
there relief efforts began pretty much immediately, and people all
(13:18):
over donated clothing and food, lumber, medical supplies, money. Doctors
came to town to to help treat the injured. Within
five days, Clara Barton and her newly established American Red
Cross we're in town. Uh. It was the first peacetime
disaster that the organization assisted in, and they really did
a lot. They built warehouses, were donated supplies to be stored,
(13:43):
um hotels for for the homeless. Buildings that were still
standing were repurposed into makeshift morgues to avoid the spread
of disease, all all of that sort of stuff. Um,
it seems kind of unbelievable, but all of these recovery
efforts seemed who have paid off almost immediately. According to
(14:03):
Brown's article, it only took a month for businesses to
reopen and only five years for the cleanup effort to
be completed. This wouldn't be the last time, however, that
Johnstown would have to deal with floods. Even though the
South Fork Dam was already destroyed, so you would think
of this big threat is taken away, so that's not
an issue. But in nineteen thirty six, Johnstown was hit
(14:25):
with fourteen feet of floodwaters caused by heavy rains combined
with snow runoff. Twenty four people died in this case
and three thousand buildings were damaged or destroyed. Then in
July nineteen seventy seven, there was another flood caused by
a line of thunderstorms that stalled over the area and
also the fact that several dams failed contributed to this.
(14:47):
In this case, five people died and there was more
than three hundred million dollars in property damage, and after
this third flood, the town's economy didn't recover as well
as it did the first couple of times. Well you
can imagine, though, Even after that eighteen eighty nine flood,
there was a lot of discussion about who was to blame, because,
(15:07):
as we've discussed, there was clearly more going on than
just the natural forces, you know, the dam and and
its maintenance. And many people did blame the South Fork
Fishing and Hunting Club for not taking more steps to
prevent the damn failure in the first place. Suits were
even filed against the club, but they never really went anywhere.
(15:28):
And in discussing how the flood of eighteen eighty nine
didn't have to happen, Brown points to general industrialization and
population growth in the area really being to blame. I mean,
we talked about that at the beginning of the show,
how this had not too long before turned from a rural,
agricultural area where some flooding wasn't terribly devastating at least,
(15:49):
to life too of densely populated industrial area. She includes
a couple of quotes to that speak really well to this.
One is from David the Elah, who is a former
podcast interviewee and he wrote a book out. His first book,
I think was about the Johnstown flood. He said, quote,
(16:10):
with the valley crowding up the way it was, the
need for lumber and land was growing apace. As a result,
more and more timber was being stripped off the mountains
and near hills, and in Johnstown the river channels were
being narrowed to make room for new buildings where the
forests were destroyed. Spring thaws and summer thunderstorms would send
torrents racing down the mountain sides. And each year the
(16:31):
torrents grew worse as the water itself tore away at
the soil and what little groundcover there was left. So
this kind of helps explain how the industrialization of the
area would make the flooding worst, taking away the natural
buffers that could have helped alleviate natural floods, and then
making everything worse too. Brown also quotes Megan Omalley, who
(16:53):
is the chief of interpretation at the Johnstown Flood National Memorial,
and she says, quote, we call the flood a natural disaster,
but it was a disaster that occurred from a combination
of natural events and human manipulation of the environment. We
see that happened over and over in human history. We
create preconditions for disaster, and then disaster occurs. And I
(17:17):
know similar arguments are often made about more recent natural disasters.
I mean, you see it pretty much every time there's
a natural disaster, maybe with the exception of tornadoes, because
I think everybody understands there's not a whole lot you
can do about that, but earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, every time
you'll see a discussion that that's similar to that one. Um.
(17:39):
I guess it's just the way of the world. Yes, Well,
not to end on to depressing a note, we do
have some listener mail to share that might be a
little bit more uplifting. But before we get to that, Okay,
de Bleina, what do we have for listener mail today? Well,
we have a couple of emails. One is from list
(18:00):
in her Claire and she soon as this cool little
song that her teacher taught her in middle school about
the lost colony of Roanoke. Do you want me to
tell it to you? I would like to hear this song.
It goes ro ro Roanoke, the lost colony. Where did
all the people go? It's a mystery. I don't know
(18:21):
what the tune is supposed to be. I mean, Claire,
if you're listening, send us the two work with ro
Ro your boat. I don't know. At first, that's what
I thought, but I can't make it work. You take
a look. I don't know. Well, maybe we'll practice after
this we can find a tune that fit um. But
thank you Claire for sharing. We always like things like
(18:43):
that little song. Our second email is from listener Kelly,
and she wrote to say I just wanted to say
I love the first portion of the Chevalier Dale podcast. Actually,
currently the second part has not even come out as
of this recording. She went on to say, I'm currently
living in London and one of the greatest things about
residing here is how easy it is to go see
(19:05):
major historical exhibition. So after listening to the first installment
of the Chevalier podcast, it was exciting to travel fifteen
minutes by tube and be standing in front of the
Chevalier's portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. However, I will
say that I don't understand why everyone was so surprised
when they found that the portrait was of a man
in woman's clothing rather than a woman, it definitely looks
(19:28):
like a man. That's kind of our assess too, So
thank you Kelly for writing in. I'm glad that somebody
heard that podcast and then rushed out right away to
go see the the Chevalier in person. Yeah, I like
that very proactive. Well, if any of you have gone
out to check on some of our podcast details in person,
(19:49):
or maybe you just want to share some ideas with
us or some comments one of recent podcasts songs, and
please include the tunes so you can sing them. It's
gotta be ro road or your but I was just
maybe I wanted an excuse not to have to actually
sing it if people listen to my poor singing skills.
But either way, right to us. We're History podcast at
Discovery dot com or you can look us up on Facebook.
(20:12):
We're also on Twitter at Missed Industry, and we have
a lot of natural disaster content, don't we do. We
actually have how floods work, So if anyone would like
to learn a little bit more about what we talked
about on this podcast, you can find that article by
visiting our homepage at www dot how Stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(20:37):
Is it how stuff works dot Com? The Lake, the
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from housework
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Debline
and chocolate Boarding. And And depending on where you live,
you've probably gotten used to the threat of a particular
type of natural disaster. I remember where I grew up,
(00:23):
it was always tornadoes that people were afraid of and
that came through the area a lot. And when I
lived on the Gulf Coast, it was hurricanes, of course.
And for the thirty thousand people who lived in Johnstown,
Pennsylvania in eight nine, what they had gotten used to
dealing with was floods. Yeah. Located in a floodplain at
the confluence of two rivers, Johnstown flooded really frequently, so
(00:46):
it was pretty common to see water in the streets,
and locals had gotten used to moving their valuables and
themselves to the upper floors of their homes when the
floodwater started to roll it. They had kind of a
routine exactly with it. But on May thirty first, eight
eighty nine, a flood of such magnitude hit the town
that even those who were holed up in their homes
upper levels weren't ready for it. It's been called one
(01:09):
of the worst disasters in American history, and nobody in
Johnstown really saw it coming. So that's partially because there
was more to this natural disaster than just nature, and
that's part of what we're going to take a look
at today. First, though, we're gonna paint a little picture
of Johnstown for you so you can understand why it
flooded so frequently in the first place, and then just
(01:30):
what kind of community it was at the time too.
So nineteenth century Johnstown was a busy industrial town in
southwestern Pennsylvania, and according to an article by Amy Lynn
Brown in National Parks, entrepreneurs had not too long before
turned it into a larger industrial sort of production area
(01:52):
of steel and iron um, and not long before that
it had just been this small rural community. So a
real dramatic change for Johnstown, and it had a burgeoning
working class community that lived there too. The town itself
was kind of hemmed in by the Little Conema and
the Stony Creek rivers, which ran along the edges of
Johnstown and then merged on the town's western end to
(02:15):
form the Connema River. These rivers flooded the town at
least once every year, and there were a couple of
reasons for that, a couple of possible I guess instigators
for the flooding. Flooding causes right. One was snow melting
and draining from the nearby Allegheny Mountains into the rivers
in the springtime specifically, which would cause the rivers to overflow.
(02:35):
And then of course at any time of year heavy
rain could also cause flooding flood the river. So those
were the natural surroundings of the town. But there was
also a man made body of water that was nearby.
It was fourteen miles up the Little Connuma River, and
it was called Lake Conuma, although I don't think of
it as as some sort of natural lake. It was
(02:56):
originally called the Western Reservoir, and it had originally been
created to supply water for the Pennsylvania Canal that went
between Johnstown and Pittsburgh, but the canal system became obsolete
not long after the reservoir project was complete, so not
having anything to do with this large body of water,
(03:17):
the reservoir was sold and had a few different owners
before it was finally sold to the South Fork Fishing
and Hunting Club in eighteen seventy nine. The club made
this former reservoir into a bit of a ritzy social
affair almost it did, uh, And it was a organization
to which many prominent Pennsylvanians belonged, including big names like
(03:41):
Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. And members
would go to this club to kind of escape the
industrial environs of Pittsburgh and enjoy things like fishing, sailing,
even musical performances. And it was the club that renamed
the reservoir Lake Knema. Just an important not to make here,
the dam that kept Lake Konuma contained, the South Fork
(04:04):
Dam was essentially made of packed dirt and rocks, and
it had not been kept up properly for a number
of years by the time it came into the club's
possession well, and most disturbingly, somebody had even taken out
the damn's drainage pipes that at some point in order
to sell them for scraps, So there wasn't any way
to drain their reservoir in order to make repair. So
(04:27):
even if you had wanted to repair the damn, you
would not have been able to. According to the Johnstown
Flood Museum, when the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club
took over it started maintaining the dam a little bit better,
but they also made some changes to it that made
it even less safe. For example, they added some screens
across the spillway to keep the expensive game fish that
(04:48):
they had stocked the lake with from escaping, and this
prevented the skill away from draining the lake's overflow. They
also made the damn a couple feet lower so that
two carriages could pass over it at the same time.
So this is we've painted a picture of of what
the situation was like uh in May of eighteen eighty nine,
and from a weather standpoint, that spring had been rather unique,
(05:10):
according to an article by Emily Lorditch and weatherwise, a
series of storms had led to record breaking rainfall that year,
So we're getting the perfect storm here. As you can tell.
On May thirty one, the residents of Johnstown were experiencing
a particularly heavy storm and Brown rights that rain was
falling at a rate of an inch per hour and
(05:33):
rivers were running six to seven ft above normal levels.
By afternoon, the streets in town were already flooding, so
people were going through their their normal routine when there
was a flood head up to the upper floors, ride
out the storm, you know, put some of your belongings upstairs. Again,
just a very typical sort of scene for Johnstown. What
(05:55):
they didn't know is that fourteen miles up at Lake Knema,
a scene was taken place that was entirely unprecedented. The
depth of the water of the four fifty acre lake
was sixty ft near the dam, and officials at the
club had been watching that level continued to rise during
this storm with great concern. Of course, the morning of
(06:16):
May thirty one, they were so worried about the dam
collapsing that they actually started to think about taking action.
And I mean people in Johnstown, just another aside here
had sort of known that the dam failing and the
dam breaking down was a possibility because of the condition
of the dam, and some people even joked about it.
And this kind of reminds me of when you do
live in an area where a certain type of natural
(06:38):
disaster sort of prevalent. Like I remember living on the
coast and when hurricanes would come, there were always people
who just sort of didn't really take it seriously. Yeah, exactly.
There's always that contingent of people, I think, but in
this case, When the people at the club saw what
was happening, they did try to take a few steps,
as I said, for to keep the dam from failing.
(06:58):
They for example, added dirt to the top. They also
dug a second spill away to relieve the pressure, and
they removed the screens that kept the stocked fish from escaping.
But it was too late. It was too late. At
this point, nothing they did was able to help in
At about three pm that day, people at the club
and in the nearby community of South Fork watched in
(07:21):
shock as the damn quote just moved away, sending twenty
million tons of water barreling down the valley. Of course,
headed right towards Johnstown in just a matter of minutes,
and according to Gene Allen's book Floods, the club wasn't
completely They were trying to take efforts to to save
(07:42):
the dam, but there was also a warning sent out.
I mean, a couple of guys had ridden through town
earlier shouting warnings that the dam was about to fail,
but people didn't really listen. I mean, like you were
just talking about there's kind of a an almost joke
like maybe the dam will fail, but people didn't really
think that was going to happen within an hour of
the damn failing, though, that twenty million tons of water
(08:04):
finally did reach Johnstown. It was traveling at speeds of
anywhere from twenty to forty miles per hour, and by
the time it reached the town it was said to
have had as much force as Niagara Falls, which is
just a stunning comparison to me. When it created a
tidal wave too, it did. It was a tidal wave
of water that was forty ft high and carried all
(08:26):
sorts of debris with it by the time it hit Johnstown,
including industrial and farm debris, houses, barns, animals, even people
both dead and alive. The townspeople were totally blindsided by this.
Some people only heard a thunder like sound as the
wave approached. Apparently it only took ten minutes basically to
wash the entire town away. Yeah, and and really the
(08:48):
entire town was washed away. Trains, entire homes just swept
up in the waves. So of course people we were
swept up in it too. Some of course, drowned right
away and the flood rushing water. Others were killed or
injured by the debris that was in the water. A
lot of people, and this is maybe one of the
more horrifying aspects of the flood. So a lot of people,
(09:10):
about three hundred to four hundred ended up surviving initially
but then getting swept away by the rushing water and
getting trapped up against this large stone bridge that was
owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. And this bridge was
actually blocking a lot of the stuff that was rushing
through the town, you know, box cars, barbed wire, big
chunks of homes, dead animals, creating this this log jam. Essentially,
(09:35):
all the debris though clogging the bridge eventually did catch
fire and the people trapped against the bridge, of course,
died at that point. Again, just one of the most
horrifying aspects of this already horrifying story. Ultimately, though, about
two thousand, two hundred nine people died in this disaster,
(09:56):
And just to give you a sense of what those
numbers mean for a town of Johnstown size, it's something
like one out of every ten people in the town.
Seven seventy of the victims were never identified. And the
number that Sarah just put out about the number of
people total who died, that included nine entire families, six
(10:18):
hundred homes, were destroyed and seventeen million dollars in property
damage was done. So that was just to give you
an idea of the toll that this disaster took. Some people, however,
did survive by writing out the flood in their homes
or in the upper stories of other buildings in town.
Others took a crazy ride down the Connema River and
(10:41):
were later rescued somewhere downstream, which is just wild to me.
I mean, I know, I just said it's crazy, and
then I said it's wild, so I said that twice.
But I have nothing to to add to that. It's
it's hard to imagine being actually carried alive barns then
dead animals going along with you. But as you can imagine,
I there of those survival scenarios were pretty harrowing, and
(11:04):
there are fortunately a lot of examples though, a lot
of records from the flood, so we're able to see
what it was like for people and how they managed
to survive. And one story that gets retold a lot
is the story of a six year old girl named
Gertrude Quinn Slatterly, who was swept away by floodwaters while
she was hanging onto this muddy mattress as a kind
(11:26):
of raft, and as she recalled, she was terrified. She
was calling out for someone to help her, and this
man dove into the water to to save her. He
made his way over to her onto the mattress, lifted
her up, and she later wrote of the experience quote,
I put both arms around his neck and held onto
him like grim death. Together we went down the stream
(11:49):
and um Miraculously. They eventually reached this white building where
men were leaning out the window trying to nab people
as they came by, rescuing people. And the rest you
are through Gertrude through the air. Some people later said
it was as much as fifteen to twenty feet through
the air uh to to safety for the other guys
(12:10):
to be able to catch her. Another woman, Anna fn Maxwell,
was in her home with her seven children when the
flood hit. She survived, but unfortunately her kids weren't so lucky.
The Johnstown Flood Museum actually shares how she described the scene,
and it's pretty sad, she said. Quote The water rose
and floated us until our heads nearly touched the ceiling.
(12:31):
It was dark and the house was tossing every way.
The air was stifling and I could not tell just
the moment the rest of the children had to give
up and drown. What I suffered with the bodies of
my seven children floating around me and the gloom can
never be told. Yeah. So pretty powerful story. And the
Johnstown Flood Museum's website shares several survival stories like this.
(12:55):
UM some are more uplifting than others. Of course, UM
in some cases too, we should say entire families did survive,
But it seems like you would have had to have
been very lucky, and all your family members would have
had to have been quite lucky for that to be
the case. One thing that is remarkable about the flood, though,
there relief efforts began pretty much immediately, and people all
(13:18):
over donated clothing and food, lumber, medical supplies, money. Doctors
came to town to to help treat the injured. Within
five days, Clara Barton and her newly established American Red
Cross we're in town. Uh. It was the first peacetime
disaster that the organization assisted in, and they really did
a lot. They built warehouses, were donated supplies to be stored,
(13:43):
um hotels for for the homeless. Buildings that were still
standing were repurposed into makeshift morgues to avoid the spread
of disease, all all of that sort of stuff. Um,
it seems kind of unbelievable, but all of these recovery
efforts seemed who have paid off almost immediately. According to
(14:03):
Brown's article, it only took a month for businesses to
reopen and only five years for the cleanup effort to
be completed. This wouldn't be the last time, however, that
Johnstown would have to deal with floods. Even though the
South Fork Dam was already destroyed, so you would think
of this big threat is taken away, so that's not
an issue. But in nineteen thirty six, Johnstown was hit
(14:25):
with fourteen feet of floodwaters caused by heavy rains combined
with snow runoff. Twenty four people died in this case
and three thousand buildings were damaged or destroyed. Then in
July nineteen seventy seven, there was another flood caused by
a line of thunderstorms that stalled over the area and
also the fact that several dams failed contributed to this.
(14:47):
In this case, five people died and there was more
than three hundred million dollars in property damage, and after
this third flood, the town's economy didn't recover as well
as it did the first couple of times. Well you
can imagine, though, Even after that eighteen eighty nine flood,
there was a lot of discussion about who was to blame, because,
(15:07):
as we've discussed, there was clearly more going on than
just the natural forces, you know, the dam and and
its maintenance. And many people did blame the South Fork
Fishing and Hunting Club for not taking more steps to
prevent the damn failure in the first place. Suits were
even filed against the club, but they never really went anywhere.
(15:28):
And in discussing how the flood of eighteen eighty nine
didn't have to happen, Brown points to general industrialization and
population growth in the area really being to blame. I mean,
we talked about that at the beginning of the show,
how this had not too long before turned from a rural,
agricultural area where some flooding wasn't terribly devastating at least,
(15:49):
to life too of densely populated industrial area. She includes
a couple of quotes to that speak really well to this.
One is from David the Elah, who is a former
podcast interviewee and he wrote a book out. His first book,
I think was about the Johnstown flood. He said, quote,
(16:10):
with the valley crowding up the way it was, the
need for lumber and land was growing apace. As a result,
more and more timber was being stripped off the mountains
and near hills, and in Johnstown the river channels were
being narrowed to make room for new buildings where the
forests were destroyed. Spring thaws and summer thunderstorms would send
torrents racing down the mountain sides. And each year the
(16:31):
torrents grew worse as the water itself tore away at
the soil and what little groundcover there was left. So
this kind of helps explain how the industrialization of the
area would make the flooding worst, taking away the natural
buffers that could have helped alleviate natural floods, and then
making everything worse too. Brown also quotes Megan Omalley, who
(16:53):
is the chief of interpretation at the Johnstown Flood National Memorial,
and she says, quote, we call the flood a natural disaster,
but it was a disaster that occurred from a combination
of natural events and human manipulation of the environment. We
see that happened over and over in human history. We
create preconditions for disaster, and then disaster occurs. And I
(17:17):
know similar arguments are often made about more recent natural disasters.
I mean, you see it pretty much every time there's
a natural disaster, maybe with the exception of tornadoes, because
I think everybody understands there's not a whole lot you
can do about that, but earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, every time
you'll see a discussion that that's similar to that one. Um.
(17:39):
I guess it's just the way of the world. Yes, Well,
not to end on to depressing a note, we do
have some listener mail to share that might be a
little bit more uplifting. But before we get to that, Okay,
de Bleina, what do we have for listener mail today? Well,
we have a couple of emails. One is from list
(18:00):
in her Claire and she soon as this cool little
song that her teacher taught her in middle school about
the lost colony of Roanoke. Do you want me to
tell it to you? I would like to hear this song.
It goes ro ro Roanoke, the lost colony. Where did
all the people go? It's a mystery. I don't know
(18:21):
what the tune is supposed to be. I mean, Claire,
if you're listening, send us the two work with ro
Ro your boat. I don't know. At first, that's what
I thought, but I can't make it work. You take
a look. I don't know. Well, maybe we'll practice after
this we can find a tune that fit um. But
thank you Claire for sharing. We always like things like
(18:43):
that little song. Our second email is from listener Kelly,
and she wrote to say I just wanted to say
I love the first portion of the Chevalier Dale podcast. Actually,
currently the second part has not even come out as
of this recording. She went on to say, I'm currently
living in London and one of the greatest things about
residing here is how easy it is to go see
(19:05):
major historical exhibition. So after listening to the first installment
of the Chevalier podcast, it was exciting to travel fifteen
minutes by tube and be standing in front of the
Chevalier's portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. However, I will
say that I don't understand why everyone was so surprised
when they found that the portrait was of a man
in woman's clothing rather than a woman, it definitely looks
(19:28):
like a man. That's kind of our assess too, So
thank you Kelly for writing in. I'm glad that somebody
heard that podcast and then rushed out right away to
go see the the Chevalier in person. Yeah, I like
that very proactive. Well, if any of you have gone
out to check on some of our podcast details in person,
(19:49):
or maybe you just want to share some ideas with
us or some comments one of recent podcasts songs, and
please include the tunes so you can sing them. It's
gotta be ro road or your but I was just
maybe I wanted an excuse not to have to actually
sing it if people listen to my poor singing skills.
But either way, right to us. We're History podcast at
Discovery dot com or you can look us up on Facebook.
(20:12):
We're also on Twitter at Missed Industry, and we have
a lot of natural disaster content, don't we do. We
actually have how floods work, So if anyone would like
to learn a little bit more about what we talked
about on this podcast, you can find that article by
visiting our homepage at www dot how Stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(20:37):
Is it how stuff works dot Com? The Lake, the
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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