July 28, 2018 • 19 mins
Today's show revisits a 2012 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina. 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 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Not long ago, we did a podcast on
Andrew Carnegie, and one of the questions that we got
from listeners afterward was why we had not discussed the
Johnstown flood. Carnegie was a member of the South Fork
Fishing and Hunting Club, which owned the damn that failed
in that flood, and the whole area had a number
of other connections to Carnegie Steel. Carnegie contributed to relief
(00:26):
efforts after the flood, and he funded the building of
a new library for the town, but neither he nor
any of the other members of the club ever expressed
any responsibility for the disaster. So there's a whole episode
about that flood in the archive from from Past host
Sarah and Deblina, and since it came up in our
listener mail recently, we thought we would share it again today.
(00:50):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuffworks dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Deblina Chokolate Boarding and depending on where you live, you've
probably gotten used to the threat of a particular type
(01:10):
of natural disaster. I remember where I grew up, 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 eighteen eighty nine, what they had gotten used to
dealing with was floods. Yeah. Located in a floodplain at
(01:31):
the confluence of two rivers, Johnstown flooded really frequently, so
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 one, eighteen
eighty nine, a flood of such magnitude hit the town
(01:53):
that even those who were holed up in their homes
upper levels weren't ready for it. It's been called one
of the worst is susters 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
(02:16):
it flooded so frequently in the first place, and then
just 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
(02:41):
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 hempt 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
(03:04):
form the Connuma 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,
(03:25):
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 Connuma, although I don't think of
it as as some sort of natural lake. It was
(03:46):
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,
(04:07):
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
(04:30):
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 Conema. Just an important note to make here,
the dam that kept Lake Conuma contained. The South Fork
(04:53):
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 the reservoir in order to make repair. So
(05:16):
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 spill way to keep the expensive game fish
(05:37):
that they had stock the lake with from escaping, and
this prevented the spill 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 panted a picture of of what
the situation was like uh in May of eight nine,
and from a weather standpoint, that spring had been rather unique,
(06:00):
according to an article by Emily Lorditch and weatherwise, a
series of storms had led to record breaking rainfall that year,
so we were 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 writes that
rain was falling at a rate of an inch per
(06:21):
hour and 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
(06:43):
for Johnstown. What they didn't know is that fourteen miles
up at Lake Conoma, a scene was taking place that
was entirely unprecedented. Depth of the water of the foy
Acre Lake was sixty ft near the dam, and officials
(07:05):
at the club had been watching that level continued to
rise during the storm with great concern. Of course, the
morning of May thirty one, they were so worried about
the damn 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
(07:27):
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 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
(07:50):
was happening, they did try to take a few steps,
as I said, for to keep the dam from failing.
They for example, added dirt to the top. They also
dug a second spill way 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, and
(08:10):
at about three pm that day, people at the club
and in the nearby community of South Fork watched in
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
(08:35):
completely They were trying to take efforts to to save
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
(08:56):
think that was going to happen. Within an hour of
the dam failing, though, that twenty million tons of water
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. Well, and it created
(09:17):
a tidal wave too, it did. It was a tidal
wave of water that was forty ft high and carried
all 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
(09:37):
sound as the wave approached. Apparently it only took ten
minutes basically to wash the entire town away. Yeah, and
and really the entire town was washed away. Trains, entire
homes just swept up in the waves. So of course
people were swept up in it too. Some of course
drowned right away in the flood of rushing water. Others
(09:58):
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, 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.
(10:19):
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 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
(10:43):
one of the most horrifying aspects of this already horrifying story. Ultimately, though,
about two thousand, two hundred nine people died in this disaster,
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.
(11:03):
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
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,
(11:28):
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 Connuma River and
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 add to that. It's hard
to imagine being actually carried alive barns and dead animals
(11:53):
going along with you. But as you can imagine, either
of these survival scenarios were pretty harrowing. And 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,
(12:16):
who was swept away by floodwaters while she was hanging
onto this muddy mattress as a kind 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
(12:36):
she later wrote of the experience quote, I put both
arms around his neck and held onto him like grim death.
Together we went downstream 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 rescuer through Gertrude through the air. Some people
(13:00):
later said it was as much as fifteen to twenty
feet through the air uh to to safety for the
other guys 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
(13:22):
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. 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
(13:45):
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 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
(14:08):
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 this flood, though, the relief efforts began
pretty much immediately, and people all over donated clothing and food, lumber,
medical supplies, money. Doctors came to town to to help
(14:29):
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 for
donated supplies to be stored, UM, hotels for for the homeless.
(14:49):
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 un believable,
but all of these recovery efforts seemed to have paid
off almost immediately. According to Brown's article, it only took
a month for businesses to reopen and only five years
(15:12):
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 with fourteen feet of floodwaters caused by
heavy rains combined with snow runoff. Twenty four people died
(15:35):
in this case and three thousand buildings were damaged or destroyed.
Then in July nine, 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. In this case, five people died and there
was more than three hundred million dollars in property damage.
(15:56):
And after this third flood, the town's economy didn't cover
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, as we've discussed, there was clearly
more going on than just the natural forces. You know,
the dam and its maintenance and many people did blame
(16:19):
the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club for not taking
more steps to prevent the damn failure in the first place.
Of suits were even filed against the club, but they
never really went anywhere. 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
(16:42):
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, to life too of
densely populated industrial area. She includes a couple of oats
to that speak really well to this. One is from
(17:02):
David McCullough, 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, 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,
(17:23):
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 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
(17:45):
the flooding worse. Yeah, taking away the natural buffers that
could have helped alleviate natural floods and then making everything
worse too. Brown also quotes Megan O'Malley, who is the
chief of interpretation at the Johnstown Flood nash A Memorial,
and she says, quote, we call the flood a natural disaster,
but it was a disaster that occurred from a combination
(18:07):
of natural events and human manipulation of the environment. We
see that's happened over and over in human history. We
create preconditions for disaster, and then disaster occurs. And I
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
(18:30):
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,
I guess it's just the way of the world. Thank
you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
(18:53):
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(19:15):
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Happy Saturday. Not long ago, we did a podcast on
Andrew Carnegie, and one of the questions that we got
from listeners afterward was why we had not discussed the
Johnstown flood. Carnegie was a member of the South Fork
Fishing and Hunting Club, which owned the damn that failed
in that flood, and the whole area had a number
of other connections to Carnegie Steel. Carnegie contributed to relief
(00:26):
efforts after the flood, and he funded the building of
a new library for the town, but neither he nor
any of the other members of the club ever expressed
any responsibility for the disaster. So there's a whole episode
about that flood in the archive from from Past host
Sarah and Deblina, and since it came up in our
listener mail recently, we thought we would share it again today.
(00:50):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuffworks dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Deblina Chokolate Boarding and depending on where you live, you've
probably gotten used to the threat of a particular type
(01:10):
of natural disaster. I remember where I grew up, 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 eighteen eighty nine, what they had gotten used to
dealing with was floods. Yeah. Located in a floodplain at
(01:31):
the confluence of two rivers, Johnstown flooded really frequently, so
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 one, eighteen
eighty nine, a flood of such magnitude hit the town
(01:53):
that even those who were holed up in their homes
upper levels weren't ready for it. It's been called one
of the worst is susters 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
(02:16):
it flooded so frequently in the first place, and then
just 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
(02:41):
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 hempt 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
(03:04):
form the Connuma 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,
(03:25):
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 Connuma, although I don't think of
it as as some sort of natural lake. It was
(03:46):
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,
(04:07):
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
(04:30):
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 Conema. Just an important note to make here,
the dam that kept Lake Conuma contained. The South Fork
(04:53):
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 the reservoir in order to make repair. So
(05:16):
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 spill way to keep the expensive game fish
(05:37):
that they had stock the lake with from escaping, and
this prevented the spill 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 panted a picture of of what
the situation was like uh in May of eight nine,
and from a weather standpoint, that spring had been rather unique,
(06:00):
according to an article by Emily Lorditch and weatherwise, a
series of storms had led to record breaking rainfall that year,
so we were 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 writes that
rain was falling at a rate of an inch per
(06:21):
hour and 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
(06:43):
for Johnstown. What they didn't know is that fourteen miles
up at Lake Conoma, a scene was taking place that
was entirely unprecedented. Depth of the water of the foy
Acre Lake was sixty ft near the dam, and officials
(07:05):
at the club had been watching that level continued to
rise during the storm with great concern. Of course, the
morning of May thirty one, they were so worried about
the damn 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
(07:27):
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 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
(07:50):
was happening, they did try to take a few steps,
as I said, for to keep the dam from failing.
They for example, added dirt to the top. They also
dug a second spill way 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, and
(08:10):
at about three pm that day, people at the club
and in the nearby community of South Fork watched in
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
(08:35):
completely They were trying to take efforts to to save
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
(08:56):
think that was going to happen. Within an hour of
the dam failing, though, that twenty million tons of water
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. Well, and it created
(09:17):
a tidal wave too, it did. It was a tidal
wave of water that was forty ft high and carried
all 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
(09:37):
sound as the wave approached. Apparently it only took ten
minutes basically to wash the entire town away. Yeah, and
and really the entire town was washed away. Trains, entire
homes just swept up in the waves. So of course
people were swept up in it too. Some of course
drowned right away in the flood of rushing water. Others
(09:58):
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, 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.
(10:19):
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 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
(10:43):
one of the most horrifying aspects of this already horrifying story. Ultimately, though,
about two thousand, two hundred nine people died in this disaster,
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.
(11:03):
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
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,
(11:28):
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 Connuma River and
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 add to that. It's hard
to imagine being actually carried alive barns and dead animals
(11:53):
going along with you. But as you can imagine, either
of these survival scenarios were pretty harrowing. And 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,
(12:16):
who was swept away by floodwaters while she was hanging
onto this muddy mattress as a kind 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
(12:36):
she later wrote of the experience quote, I put both
arms around his neck and held onto him like grim death.
Together we went downstream 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 rescuer through Gertrude through the air. Some people
(13:00):
later said it was as much as fifteen to twenty
feet through the air uh to to safety for the
other guys 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
(13:22):
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. 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
(13:45):
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 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
(14:08):
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 this flood, though, the relief efforts began
pretty much immediately, and people all over donated clothing and food, lumber,
medical supplies, money. Doctors came to town to to help
(14:29):
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 for
donated supplies to be stored, UM, hotels for for the homeless.
(14:49):
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 un believable,
but all of these recovery efforts seemed to have paid
off almost immediately. According to Brown's article, it only took
a month for businesses to reopen and only five years
(15:12):
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 with fourteen feet of floodwaters caused by
heavy rains combined with snow runoff. Twenty four people died
(15:35):
in this case and three thousand buildings were damaged or destroyed.
Then in July nine, 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. In this case, five people died and there
was more than three hundred million dollars in property damage.
(15:56):
And after this third flood, the town's economy didn't cover
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, as we've discussed, there was clearly
more going on than just the natural forces. You know,
the dam and its maintenance and many people did blame
(16:19):
the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club for not taking
more steps to prevent the damn failure in the first place.
Of suits were even filed against the club, but they
never really went anywhere. 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
(16:42):
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, to life too of
densely populated industrial area. She includes a couple of oats
to that speak really well to this. One is from
(17:02):
David McCullough, 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, 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,
(17:23):
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 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
(17:45):
the flooding worse. Yeah, taking away the natural buffers that
could have helped alleviate natural floods and then making everything
worse too. Brown also quotes Megan O'Malley, who is the
chief of interpretation at the Johnstown Flood nash A Memorial,
and she says, quote, we call the flood a natural disaster,
but it was a disaster that occurred from a combination
(18:07):
of natural events and human manipulation of the environment. We
see that's happened over and over in human history. We
create preconditions for disaster, and then disaster occurs. And I
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
(18:30):
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,
I guess it's just the way of the world. Thank
you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
(18:53):
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information.
We are at History Podcasts at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media, that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
(19:15):
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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