The Great Johnstown Flood Disaster of 1889 | Episode 88 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Today's episode comes by popular request, and without spoiling anything
I can tell you. The safety segment in today's episode
is titled how to Run for your Life when You're
not a Runner. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most

(00:31):
dangerous podcast. Together, we're going to rediscover some of the
most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring but largely unheard of
or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world.
On today's episode, we will discuss how some of the
richest men in America created a boiling black mountain of

(00:52):
crap as powerful as a small nuclear blast. We will,
for only the second time in the show's history, to
a disaster made worse by a liberal and unexpected application
of barbed wire. And we will find out why sometimes
mass graves are just better. And if you were listening
on Patreon, you would learn how people who forget to

(01:15):
patent their inventions die. You'd learn the three most popular
maiming injuries among child labor in the eighteen hundreds, and
I'll tell you right now number three will really surprise you.
And you would learn how people in this gentle age
use water, electricity, cream, and beef broth to unscramble your
nervous system. This is not the show you play around kids,

(01:36):
or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as
long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged
and learn something that could potentially save your life, our
work is done. So with all that said, shoot the
kids out of the room, put on your headphones and
safety glasses, and let's begin. Was very young. She lived

(02:01):
in a small village here in Canada, and she described
to me what it was like when a phone was
first installed in their house. To her, hearing the voice
of someone miles away materializing in their home was like magic,
and if you could put yourself in the right headspace,
you would really think so too. People felt the same
way about moving pictures and radio and photography before that.

(02:25):
You can't imagine the crowds that gathered to watch a
simple glass bulb conjured light out of nothing with just
the flick of a switch. And it's actually a shame.
It's just a fluke of birth that has us living now.
We introduced new and fantastical things all the time, but
nothing that ever leaves you completely gob stopped in their
magical presence. We've always been inventive, and we've created some

(02:49):
incredibly useful and important things, you know, cities, writing the wheel,
but none of those inspired the kind of life changing
awe that you compared to seeing your face in a
polished mirror for the first time. Now, with all of
this spirit of awe in mind, I want you to
try to imagine the world before metal. Up to a point,

(03:13):
everything that we knew was made out of wood and
stone and bone and clay. And then one day, somewhere
in probably the Zagross Mountains of Turkey, about eleven thousand
years ago, someone had a pretty good fire going and
a nearby rock cracked open, revealing a seam of liquid copper,
And just like that, the world changed again. The world

(03:37):
suddenly became a trippy place of transformation and spiritual enthusiasm
and proper tools and all form of decoration and ornaments. Rocks,
as it turns out, were magic in the truest, oldest
sense of the word. Literally. The only thing older and
more magical would have been the creation of fire. For pference,

(04:00):
there was about a four hundred thousand year gap between
using fire and metal work. Would it really surprise you
if I told you that people were so agog about
metal that for most of its history people gave it
mythical origins, like it was handed down from the gods.
The Greeks explained it thusly. According to their mythology about

(04:22):
four thousand years ago, Hera was the goddess of women
and childbirth and marriage, and only two of those are
necessary to actually have a baby, and hers was called Hephestus,
and Hephestus was said to have one of those faces
that only a mother could love. But sadly for him,
not his mother. She threw him off Mount Olympus to Earth,

(04:45):
where he hooked up with some nymphs that hooked him
up with his own underwater volcano base, where he took
up metal work to keep his mind busy and became
the god of fire and metalworking. And there are multiple
versions of this story, so it really depends on on
what you believe. Some Africans learned from Ogan, the god
of iron, Hindus owe it to Indra, the god of storms,

(05:08):
the Chinese thank Huangdy, and the Norse think underground dwarfs.
And it really doesn't matter what the origin, because metal
work became arguably the first and most foundational technology in
human civilization. Every major leap in human progress, from the
Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution to the first chimp

(05:29):
in space, were impossible without it. No cities, no machines,
no computers, none of it. I heard one person say,
metalwork literally built empires out of rocks. The metal working industry,
of course, is pretty filthy, and I think that's the
only reason that we don't treat the job with more
reference today. Oh, if you're wondering, there will be a

(05:53):
metalworking plant in this episode. So are we smelting rocks
in an underwater Volca canoe based today? Hell? No, furthest
thing from it. It's been a minute since we've graced
the highlands of western Pennsylvania as a group, but congratulations,
we are back today in the Keystone State. Here we

(06:15):
enjoyed the natural beauty of the area, and we even
did a little surfing, and yes, people died, but with
rare exception, that's the show. Rural Pennsylvania is quietly beautiful,
narrow country roads winding along valleys and ridgelines, rolling hills,
dense woodlands and open farmland. The air feels fresh and

(06:38):
nothing's flashy, but it is charming as hell. It's timeless,
So what brings us here today? Why to witness history.
Of course, we will be spending our time in a
little place called Johnstown. Johnstown was a thriving little industrial
town nestled in the Laurel Highlands region of the Appalachian Mountains.

(07:00):
It was set in a narrow river valley surrounded by steep,
picturesque hills. It was built right where the steep ridges
channeled the Stony Creek and the Little Conamaw Rivers into
the regular size Connamaw River. If you remember from our
Frank Rocks Line episode, rivers tend to cut through mountains
and they're nice enough to carve out these natural trade routes.

(07:22):
And because of this, Johnstown became a key point on
the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal, which connected Philadelphia with Pittsburgh. Same
story with the Pennsylvania Railroad. Between the ease of transport
and surroundings rich in natural resources like coal and timber
and iron ore, it was perfect for manufacturing steel. By

(07:44):
the mid eighteen hundreds, Johnstown had become one of the
most important iron and steel centers in the entire United States,
and at the heart of it was the Cambria Iron Company.
It was founded all the way back in eighteen fifty
two and quickly became one of the biggest steel producers
in the nation. Like we said, thousands of skilled laborers

(08:05):
with dozens of different accents from Germany, the UK, Slovakia, Hungaria, Italy,
Poland Croatia. They all settled in this new land in
neighborhoods built close to the mills. And these mills did
a lot more than simply turn rock into metal and
Europeans into Americans. They created the future. And what made

(08:27):
Johnstown so notable of all the steel towns in all
of the world, Johnstown had figured out a way to
do it better. You ever hear of the Bessemer process.
You mean Henry Bessemer's Bessemer process for producing steel from
molten iron. I do the very same. Long story short,
steel has always been laborious and difficult to make, but

(08:50):
the Bessemer process increased production with the use of a
converter that blue air through the iron to remove impurities.
And I have said this before and I will say
it again. This is not an engineering podcast, and there
is no test at the end. Let me just say
long story short, producing steel from iron is slow and expensive.

(09:12):
They said At the time, a skilled worker might produce
maybe fifty to seventy pounds of steel in a day,
but the Bessemer converter could produce five tons in less
than an hour. So yeah, the Bessemer process led to
one of the most technologically advanced steel meals to be
found anywhere. Blast furnaces ran day and night. It was

(09:34):
a hard, gritty, and sometimes dangerous life, but by eighteen
eighty standards those laborers made bank. Of course, the trade
is that workers were always brushing up against blast furnaces
and high pressure steam systems, and molten iron spills and
steam explosions and slag burns were everywhere, all while not

(09:55):
wearing much more protective gear than you are wearing now.
The Embryo Iron Company not only provided employment, but also
built all the housing and schools and other random needs
for its workers. Johnstown started as a frontier outpost, but
quickly came to be known as a bustling industrial town
with a growing middle class population, which by the time

(10:18):
of today's story was over thirty thousand. For reference, the
state capitol in Harrisburg had just under thirty nine thousand
people in it. Johnstown was considered a great place to live,
and we are going to come right back to it.
But first we are going to head about fourteen miles
or twenty two kilometers up river up the Allegheny Mountains

(10:39):
to the humble village of South Fork, Pennsylvania. Its terrain
was steep and forested and largely rural, and most of
South Fork's five hundred or so residents were railroad workers
or miners' families, living clustered along the narrow valley floor
by the river. About another mile or one and a
half kilometers upstream and slightly southeast of the town stood

(11:02):
the South Fork Dam. It was an earth fill embankment
dam seventy two feet high and over nine hundred feet wide.
It was built out of packed earth and rock, with
a broad, almost sloped kind of a back that rose
up from the riverbed. At its base, it would have
looked like a seven story building three football fields wide.

(11:24):
If it's easier, that's twelve dodge caravans tall and about
one hundred and fifty five long. It was thicker at
the base than a six lane highway, and for reference,
each side of the pentagon is also nine hundred feet wide.
It was originally constructed in eighteen fifty three by the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The dam was meant to be part

(11:45):
of a canal system linking Pittsburgh to the eastern half
of the state. It was also built to serve as
part of the Pennsylvania main Line of public works. Think
of it as like a four hundred mile or six
hundred and fifty kilometers system of canals and railroads that
travel through the mountains that helped connect Philadelphia with Pittsburgh.
The dam's purpose was to store water and then regulate

(12:06):
the flow of that water into the Pennsylvania Canal. And
this was no small amount of water. The whole thing
held back a vast artificial lake known as Lake conoma
artificial meaning. They created it by damming the south fork
of the Little Konama River that was two miles or
just over three kilometers long, one mile or just over

(12:29):
one and a half kilometers wide, and about sixty feet deep.
And here's the thing. They started this dam back in
eighteen thirty eight, and by the time they finished it,
railroads had become so important to the country that the
canal systems kind of started to feel a little obsolete.
Trains were faster and more reliable, so by virtue of

(12:51):
the transverse property of utility, these canals fell out of use,
and the dam also lost purpose and started to rot.
It was sold off to the Pennsylvania Railroad, who pretty
much immediately realized they had no use for it, so
they just let it sit there and it fell into
disrepair all the way until eighteen eighty when they sold

(13:12):
it to a group of Pittsburgh's business elite. They wanted
a dam. Well, no, not overly, no, they wanted the
lake and all of the land around it to turn
into a private camp getaway for hunting humans. I'm only kidding.
They transformed the lake and the surrounding lands into a

(13:34):
quiet and private retreat from city life, and these men
came together to form the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club.
The club's membership read like a who's who of Gilded
age mega tycoons. Sixty one members made up of executives
from the railroad and coal and iron ore industries. They
got oil magnates, steel barrens, banking barns, Lots of prominent

(13:58):
lawyers and businessmen, and even a few lowly state representatives
were allowed. The most recognizable would have been steel magnate
half decent human being, and the guy they named Carnegie
Hall after Andrew Carnegie, fellow steel magnate and striker murdering
business warlord Henry Clay Frick Banking an oil millionaire and

(14:20):
former U S Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, and
the imaginatively named Pennsylvania Senator Philander Knox, and the list
goes on and on, and together they represented a collective
wealth usually held by foreign royalty and hoarded in caves
guarded by a sleeping dragon. Their combined fortunes, adjusted for inflation,

(14:42):
would total tens of billions of dollars today. And together
they built a clubhouse which sat along the lake as
a kind of a crown jewel, ringed with private cottages
around its wooded shore. They basically created a playland for
the indescribably wealthy, perfect for voting and cooling off in
the heat of the summer while pretending to fish well,

(15:05):
the fish themselves weren't pretend. Part of being there meant
they had filled this lake with game fish. I'll also
point out that back then, wealthy people like this were
also known to bring in foreign animals to release into
the woods for sport like gazelle's or kangaroos, and stories
still do circulate about manhunts using vagrants or servants who

(15:26):
had been paid to run. Yeah, the kind of crowd
that when I originally said that they hunted humans for
sport earlier, a certain percentage of you will believe that
no matter what. Now, today's story actually begins before today's story.
If that makes sense, Let's take it back to early

(15:46):
May eighteen eighty nine. Pennsylvania had been experiencing exceptionally heavy
and sustained rainfall. May had been a very wet bump.
Storm after storm had swept through Sache, raiding the soil
and swelling every river and stream. They were getting sucker
punched by a slow moving, low pressure, superwet system of

(16:08):
air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. And during
the last week of May alone, six to ten inches
of rain fell across western and central Pennsylvania. And then
overnight on May the thirtieth into May the thirty first,
it really doubled down. Another six to ten inches of
rain fell in just twenty four hours. And if you

(16:29):
think weather prediction and early warning systems are poor, in
twenty twenty five, you can only imagine how bad they
were in eighteen eighty nine. By the end of May,
the entire Conoma Valley was soaked and the rivers were
rising menacingly. But at the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club,
amongst the people so wealthy that common worldly concern seemed

(16:53):
like fiction. Were they worried? Well? Actually, yes. You have
to remember they were right on the end of Lake Konoma,
and it had become frighteningly high. And I don't mean
like you in high school. I mean that the lake's
surface was nearly at the dam's crest. The water had
risen two feet overnight. Laiah Sunger had been the club's

(17:15):
president and manager, and as the water began lapping over
the top, he jumped into action. He sent a messenger
to the nearest town to telegraph a warning to communities
downstream that the dam was close to overflowing and could
cause some flooding. He also asked workers to try to
raise the height of the dam. It's a little late,

(17:37):
but he tried. So. If you picture an earthen dam
as something you might build on a beach, like a
hump of sand or dirt, the thinnest point is going
to be at the very top where it builds to
a peak. Workers tried to reinforce the dam with mud
and stone, but the water wasn't stopping, and the pressure
of all that weight was beginning to show by the

(17:58):
afternoon of May thirty first. By around two forty five,
the water finally overtopped the dam. As it began to
flow over, it eroded the top and began to scour
away the downstream face of the dam. You ever see
that video of a raccoon trying to wash cotton candy
before eating it. Well, the outside slope began softening into
mud almost immediately, and the water carved it out deeper

(18:21):
and faster with every passing second, and by three ten
that afternoon, the South Fork Dam gave way with a
deluge as loud as thunder. An entire lake. Roughly twenty
million tons or four point eight billion gallons of water
pushed the entire mass of the dam out of the way.

(18:42):
Imagine four and a half million Dodge caravans full of
water racing towards you like a wall. A wall of
water at least seventy feet tall and three hundred feet wide,
to begin expanded to fill the narrow, steep walled valley
and swept everything clean before it within indescribable violence. It
would have been as profoundly shocking as watching the World

(19:05):
Trade centers collapse in person from the sidewalk. A literal
wall of water, dark with silk trees and wreckage, and
taller than a six story building, raced down the Little
Conoma River at speeds up to forty miles or sixty
five kilometers an hour, and with a volume and energy
greater than Niagara Falls. And to make things worse, the

(19:26):
river bed had a natural gradient of about forty feet
per mile, and that's pretty steep, so the water got
a good head of steam under it as it flowed.
That said, this is not normally a river much taller
than say a donkey. And its first stop was the
town of South Fork, Pennsylvania. It was a quiet little

(19:46):
community of maybe five hundred working classmen and their families,
like we said, and each of them had been tied
to the railroads or the coal mines, and the Little
Conoma normally just peacefully wound through town, gently passing homes
and pastures that had been dug out of the steep
forested valley. The only disturbances that they might normally expect
were the far off whistle of a train, but today

(20:09):
residents described hearing a low rumble that built into a
deafening roar. The residents of South Fork had almost no
time to react. Only people who had already been near
higher ground stood any chance of surviving, and lower lying
homes along the river were swept away in seconds. But
there was some mercy here. See. South Fork lies at

(20:32):
a point where the Little Konama River makes a bend
and the terrain widens around a floodplain, and a lot
of the town lived directly above the river bank, which
gave them the extra time to scramble for their lives.
The railroad embankment running through town also helped deflect some
of the main force of the water and sending them
majority of the flood powering downstream, and incredibly, only twenty

(20:56):
residents had been killed. One survivor, a man named Daniel Payton,
not only survived, but he found a working telegraph and
began warning towns downstream, the next being Mineral Point, only
two and a half miles or four kilometers from the dam.
Mineral Point was a small town of only about thirty
or forty families, mostly railroad workers and coal miners in

(21:17):
their families, again sitting in a narrow section of the
river valley directly beside the river. South Fork had gotten
off relatively lucky on account of a fluke of geography,
but Mineral Point would not. If you had not heard
of mineral Point, Pennsylvania before. There is a pretty good
reason mineral Point, Pennsylvania holds a rare distinction of being

(21:41):
one of the only inhabited towns in US history to
be wiped out in its entirety by a natural disaster.
Every single resident of mineral Point, every man, woman, and child,
was dead. The power of the flood stripped everything soil, rock,
all the houses, the outbuildings, even foundation stones had been

(22:03):
scoured clean. I mean it was literally wiped off the map,
and eyewitnesses described the area looking like just freshly plowed ground.
Not a single trace remained. There was no sign that
a town had ever existed there. And don't let South
Forks experience fool you. Mineral Point would set the tone
for this disaster, and East Conoma was next. If you

(22:27):
like railroads and all things railroads, you would love East Conoma.
It grew up as a bustling railroad suburb with switching
stations and repair yards and a freight depot and a
large roundhouse. And it even had one of those gigantic
turntables for spinning trains around. It's what you might picture
for an eighteen hundreds industrial town, rows of wood frame

(22:50):
houses stacked close together along the steep hillsides or nestled
near the tracks, and connected by laundry lines and a
seemingly permanent cloud of coal smoke. It sat just five
miles or eight kilometers downstream, and it was peaceful, was
until the telegraph lines exploded with warnings from upstream. Not

(23:11):
that they had time to do anything about it. Before
the tippy tapping of the telegraph was even complete. The
work is that the railyards were the first to become
aware of what was coming. They turned excitedly and ran
to try to warn the people of ease conoma, but
time was not on their side. Some residents were able
to flee, you know, scramble really, But when the water arrived,

(23:33):
it was so dense and thick with debris it destroyed
everything it touched. Entire neighborhoods had been devoured, and citizens
watched in silent horror as everything from bodies to furniture
to entire homes raced down the river at tremendous speed
by a black, churning monster, grinding up everything in its path.

(23:53):
It all happened too fast to really take in. You
might see a dead horse fly by, followed by half
a flaming schoolhouse before you really had a chance to
explore your feelings about the baby that you just saw
riding a railway tile. Five seconds earlier, entire rail yards
had been destroyed, which one witness described as sounding like
a train full of dynamite going off. Imagine witnessing entire

(24:16):
railcars built with people being swept helplessly away before submerging,
never to be seen again. Further downstream, about nine miles
or fourteen and a half kilometers from the dam, lay
the town of Woodvale. As the flood tore through the
Connama Valley, it reached Woodvale just before four pm, and surprise,
Woodvale was another company town. It was home to laborers

(24:39):
and their families. They lived in densely packed housing close
to the river and the mills. And there were a
lot of mills here, a flour mill, chemical works, a tannery,
Brickworks and the Cambria Ironworks woolen mill. By four o'clock,
the mill was still busy. And remember this is eighteen
eighty nine, so there are going to be a lot

(25:00):
of women and children toiling in that mill, and they
were unaware that a wall of debris and water was
only minutes away. It was still busy destroying the rail yard.
There was a passenger train that was being loaded at
the time, which was immediately swamped, smashed and carried away.
And it's hard to imagine objects as large and imposing
as a train car being tossed around like weightless toys

(25:23):
and broiling water, and not just trains. So many people
were being swept along, Some clung to roofs or floating furniture,
and they all screamed as I passed by, and many
would be crushed or impaled or bisected or decapitated or
dragged below the waves by trees and pieces of homes
and everything that used to make up those communities. But

(25:44):
it gets worse. See in Woodvale, the Gautier Wireworks was
also destroyed. And so you know the reason you'll find
this so distressing was that when the wireworks was destroyed,
thousands of miles of barbed wire was lifted and dragged
down stream. The last time we talked about barbed wire
was during our Skinny Live Air Show disaster episode where

(26:06):
it became wrapped around a crashing plane that skidded across
a runway and playing a kind of a modified game
of Tag and red Rover with thousands of families. I
believe we said, let's never talk about the effects of
barbed wire draped and pulled quickly across the crowd ever again.
But here we are. It was now part of the flood,

(26:26):
and now painful entanglement and drowning without mercy was on
the menu downstream. Do you have any idea how much
force it would take to throw a railcar like it
was a toy and twist it up like a pretzel.
Well I tried to figure it out, and here's what
we got. The water would have been traveling with about
one hundred million horsepower and arrive with a punch of

(26:48):
about fifty thousand pounds of forest per square foot. So
when that wall hit the mill, it didn't just wash
over it or push it or try to bend it
in half. It tore it apart. And that main building
had been a cathedral of industry. Picture a towering brick
industrial building with heavy wooden floors and beams, and sided

(27:09):
with rows of large rectangular windows for illumination. Cambria's woolen
mill was a factory where wool was taken to be
processed into fabric. So picture workers, okay, Picture a bunch
of sweaty children hunched over looms and spinning frame machines
in a noise and lind filled hall, surrounded by tons

(27:29):
of raw wool. They typically built buildings like this along
rivers to spin water wheels or turbines, but the machines
at the Cambria Woolen Mill needed steam power, so it
came with high pressure coal fired cast iron industrial boilers
to power those machines. They ran around six hundred degrees
fahrenheit are three hundred and fifteen celsius, and ran under

(27:52):
pressure upwards of one hundred pounds per square inch, And
the sudden and unexpected introduction of all that cold river
water hitting them caused the metal to contract and warp
and crack, and they rustured violently. And here's a weird
stat they would have blown up with the force of
twenty five hell fire missiles each and witnesses called this

(28:14):
a disaster within a disaster. Boiler explosions literally are their
own episode, sometimes to remind you. When all that freezing
and boiling material met, they celebrated with a hardy steam flash,
where the water instantly turns into vapor, which is only
a problem because it insists on doing it. At seventeen

(28:35):
hundred times its original volume, the boilers would have expanded
outwards with incredible pressure and acted just like explosives. Imagine
if the pressure cooker bombs from the Boston Marathon bombing
had been the size of Dodge caravans. The blast turned
every surface of the plant into the kind of delicious
kindling that fire adores and those who hadn't been killed

(28:59):
instantly were then caught up in those fires and secondary explosions.
Much of this now burning debris, including timber and railcars
and furniture, was carried away by the floodwaters and floated downstream,
where it eventually lodged against the Pennsylvania Railroad's massive stone
bridge at the edge of Johnstown. The bridge was an

(29:21):
arched granite span and was built strong enough to withstand
the incredible weight of the onslaught. And if you were thinking,
if I ever get to time travel to witness one
of these disasters in person, do not make it this one.
Thousands of tons of debris piled up against the bridge's arches,
making a new dam out of wood and metal and oil,

(29:43):
tanks and bodies. I mean, you name it, and that
pile quickly grew to be over thirty feet high and
about seven hundred and fifty feet wide. Hundreds of people
who had survived the initial flood were still trapped inside
the mill as it pinned against the bridge. And I
don't mean they were just trapped there nervously pacing around

(30:03):
a room. I mean that they were trapped in a
space no longer recognizable as a room, while millions of
pounds of force held and crushed them against the granite
will of the bridge. And somewhere in the middle of
all that is you. Witnesses said, people could be heard
screaming from the inside, but there was no human way

(30:23):
to reach them. And then, unimaginably, fueled by all the
oil and coal and cotton inside, smoke began to pour
from the mill. All the coal stoves and lanterns inside
had shattered, setting the entire mass on fire. It had
become a floating inferno that set the river itself on
fire from the escaping oil and spoiler. It would go

(30:47):
on to burn for three days. I don't have to
tell you what became of all those pinned in the
debris as the flames slowly reached them. And I would
like to welcome them and you to John's Town, Pennsylvania.
We are now fourteen miles or twenty two and a
half kilometers from the dam, and it had taken almost

(31:07):
an hour for the floodwaters to reach this far. It
didn't look like water anymore, mind you. People who saw
coming said it looked like a moving, boiling, black mountain
of crap. Now we've seen some fairly catastrophic and apocalyptic
things happened on the way here. It had comprehensively destroyed
everything in its path so far. But what happened when

(31:31):
that way finally reached Johnstown, a city of around thirty
thousand people, is going to be on a scale unlike
anything we have seen before. So you're listening to a
podcast and you think you're visiting Appalachia for some light
recreation and sightseeing, and the next thing you know, the
landscape is coming to see you. Will you know what

(31:55):
to do? There's two things I'm going to try to
do here. First, I'm going to try to give you
your best chance at survival, you know, getting you out
of the way of oncoming death without keeling over dead
from the effort. You know how we say you should
know your exits when you enter a new building. Well,
if you live near water, it's the same idea, but

(32:16):
for figuring out the closest higher ground. You know that
joke about how you don't have to outrun the bear,
you just need to outrun the next slowest person. Well
not in this scenario. You are not going to outrun
a flood. You say, bolt isn't going to outrun a flood.
And as little as six inches of moving water is
more than enough to knock you down. Less than two

(32:38):
feet can carry away most vehicles, so running running away
is not an option. However, outclimbing of flood is and
you're on a clock. If you don't run regularly uphill,
terrain is going to wreck you fast. Going all out
for fifteen seconds can leave you as winded and useless

(32:58):
as a bank of garbage waiting for picks up. So
my simplest advice is to move quickly, but don't run run.
Rule a thumb. You should be able to speak and
broken sentences, not pulding your chest or gasping for air,
and on that. When you're running, try breathing in for
two or three steps, then out for two or three steps,
in through the nose, out through the mouth, like you're

(33:19):
smelling a pie. Now. Side note, if you've been sitting
there practicing your breathing and got carried away by floodwaters
because we didn't get to the part of the safety
segment where we specifically told you to actually run, well,
don't hold your breath, but keeping air in your lungs
will help you stay buoyant. But that's a very different
kind of a safety segment. So here is how to

(33:42):
get out of the way without injuring yourself. Speed is
the key. It's key, but it's not the key. You'd
be surprised how fast you get tired running uphill, especially
around loose rocks or wet roots or soft mud. Your
heart is going to be pounding, and if you panic,
you will spiral. So it's better to take twice as

(34:03):
many small strides than large sprinty strides for trying to
keep your balance and control on unpredictably messy terrain. In fact,
keeping your center of gravity low and your knee slightly bent,
meaning you're leaning forward, but you're nothunching forward well when
you're running. That helps absorb shocks and also prevents falls.
And as long as we are critiquing technique, they say

(34:25):
for shock absorption, you actually want to land midfoot, not
on your toes or your heels. And as long as
we're not tripping, those dramatic over the shoulder glances to
see what you're running away from are a great way
to trip, So no looking back, keep your eyes forward.
And yeah, you might find yourself dancing around stuff kind
of like a wide receiver, only uphill. And if you're

(34:46):
doing this and you need to change direction, you want
to turn your whole body, not just your feet. When
you're pivoting and changing direction, you want to act more
like a robot with tractor treads, but faster. The key is, yes,
you want to panic, but you also want to be comfortable,
So just pace yourself, do what you can, keep moving,
don't do too much, don't shread your hamstrings, don't give

(35:07):
yourself a heart attack. And my final thought, when you
finally do reach a nice safe point, don't fall down.
When you get to safety, walk it off. You want
to just keep walking to let your heart rate fall naturally,
and then you can feel comfortable sitting. Once your breathing's
returned to normal. You collapse and bend over and give
into all that kind of drama, and that can restrict

(35:28):
your airflow, and breathing is always better for you than
blacking out. And I say all this knowing full well
that in a panic you're going to throw it all
out the window if the situation is bad enough. But
I do hope you remember at least a little of it.
And if you know you're not a runner, and this
is some pretty rich advice, how about taking five minutes
once a week to pretend you are. They say one

(35:52):
minute of running now might save your life down the road.
And all I care is keeping you as safe as
possible without adding blown knee and exertional myriocardial infarction to
your autopsy. The best way to describe an aerial view
of Johnstown is picture it sitting on a low lying

(36:13):
floodplain along a river and completely coated in rail lines
and houses and shops and factories. It was an industrial boomtown. First,
there'd been the mines and the mining companies and all
the subsidiary industries that popped up alongside it. Brickworks, steel works,
lumber mills, quarries, you name it. There were at least

(36:34):
another twenty satellite businesses supporting the mines alone. And here's
the thing. Those mines couldn't hold a candle to the
Cambria Iron Works. So you know, the Cambria Ironworks was
one of the largest and most important steel producing sites
in the country, so obviously it was gonna be the
biggest employer in all of Johnstown. The Ironworks included multiple

(36:59):
rolling mills, foundries, machine shops, rail mills, and pattern shops
and blast furnaces that spanned for over sixty acres. This
thing employed as many as seven thousand people. And remember
all that rain I told you about leading up to
today's story, Well, in Johnstown, those heavy rains had already

(37:19):
had people pinned down and sheltering in place. The people
of Johnstown were no stranger to a little extra water,
and they thought they knew what to expect. Over the
past couple of days, when water first started appearing in
the streets and homeowners started moving valuables and dragging their
carpets to higher floors. You know, once waters started pouring
into their basements, shopkeepers even let employees go home early

(37:42):
to prepare and sand bagged up their storefronts. Like I said,
the valley had flooded before. In fact, flooding happened fairly
often in southwestern Pennsylvania, so not a lot of panic
to be had. I mean, yes, this had been one
of the heaviest rainfalls in living memory, but they weren't worried.
They'd built their homes with all this in mind. They

(38:02):
built second floors as a place to escape to, and
cellars designed to flood. They actually call that sacrificial design.
Flooding the basement can actually protect the structural integrity of
the entire building. But here's the thing. If an engineering
squad from the future had time traveled back to Johnstown
on this day and they said we are here to
protect you, well, they would need to put up a

(38:25):
barrier or shield capable of eating or deflecting the energy
equivalent to a small nuclear blast. The water arrived with
the power of just under half a kiloton of explosive energy.
The waves smashed into the city's west end. Buildings were
torn from their foundations and sent crashing into each other
like driftwood. Entire neighborhoods were lifted and flattened in seconds.

(38:49):
Survivors clung to roofs, debris, and the few buildings that
were made standing. Others who weren't killed instantly found themselves
being swept down the valley to their deaths. Actory workers
were killed at their posts and dragged away with their machines,
while non working aged children at home were swept away,
while their non working age childhood counterparts at home were

(39:10):
swept away too. Some families last thought was to cling
to the rafters in their attics as the water rushed
through their homes. It was a scene of unthinkable human suffering,
and in less than ten minutes most of the city
was pulverized or underwater. When the floodwaters finally receded, the
scope of the devastation became clear. Entire sections of Johnstown

(39:35):
had turned into a flattened wasteland. Churches, schools, stores, factories
all gone. Very few structures remained, and again, coal stoves
and lanterns lit the remains of the town, and it
smoldered and burned for three days. Except for the cries
of the injured and the crackle of the fire, the

(39:56):
valley was utterly silent. Rescuers arrived were blessly and a
lot of what they found defied medical description. Without getting
into it, let me just say, remember all that barbed wire.
It had tangled with trees and homes and debris, and
the bulk of it became razorlike nets woven through the

(40:16):
massive debris pile at the stone bridge like a sluice
for bodies. And hundreds of people had been trapped by
that pile. Some had been swept into it by the
waters and tried to climb on top to survive, and
more than a few bodies of those who did not
make it on top were found entangled in it, along
with severed limbs. Yes, some of the people who couldn't

(40:38):
escape the fire couldn't escape because they had been held
in place by barbed wire, and others trapped by the
wire had their limbs guillotined off and carried away by
the rushing waters. Relief workers were forced to cut bodies
free from the coils, and many victims were found horribly
mutilated and or burned beyond were ignition. Four square miles

(41:02):
of Johnstown was completely leveled, including about sixteen hundred homes,
two hundred eighty businesses, and most of the Cambria Iron Company.
Two thousand, two hundred and nine people are known to
have died in the water. Some had been found miles downstream,
others buried in mud or entangled in debris. Here's an

(41:24):
incredible statistic. Ninety nine entire families perished the entire line.
Four hundred children under the age of ten had been killed,
and at least seven hundred bodies would never be identified.
And when I described how quiet the place had become,
that was only broken by the sounds of grief and

(41:44):
the cries of the injured, and the arrival of rescuers
and journalists. The waters hadn't even receded yet when they
arrived to document this disaster for the world. This flood
had become the news event of the decade. But for
those first hours after the flood, Johnstown was a city
of the dead, a living cemetery. So what happened in

(42:11):
the days immediately following the flood, The scale of the
disasters shocked the entire country. Graphic illustrations and horrifying casualty
figures filled the front pages of major newspapers from New
York to San Francisco. Gruesome factoids like doctors worrying about
diseases breeding in the water, which was filled with the

(42:31):
decaying bodies of humans and animals, kept readers glued. The
public response was immediate and profound. Relief trains arrived carrying food, blankets,
medical supplies, and volunteers from everywhere. Churches collected donations, school
children sent pennies. Even labor unions organized food shipments. Donations

(42:53):
poured in from across the United States and abroad, and
they raised over four million dollars in donations, which today
would be closer to one hundred and forty million dollars.
And for reference, in eighteen ninety nine, you could buy
an entire horse for four dollars. And into the scene
stepped Clara Barton, American badass and founder of the American

(43:15):
Red Cross. Clara Barton was sixty seven years old when
she arrived with a team of doctors and nurses and
stick handled a massive on the ground relief operation. There
were no government agencies to handle anything like this back
in eighteen eighty nine. They built shelters and feeding stations
and medical tents and temporary housing. They called them Red

(43:38):
Cross hotels, and they were just wooden barracks. But to
the displaced families who otherwise would have had to winter
outdoors that year, they were a blessing. And they hits
just kept on coming, and that winter was bitterly cold.
Without giving anything away, this disaster sits very, very close

(43:59):
to the top of the list of deadliest natural disasters
in US history. And Clara Barton worked day and night.
She literally slept in the mud for over five months.
Her work there is the entire reason that we know
the Red Cross today, and it became a permanent fixture
in American disaster response. Public attention turned from shock to

(44:23):
anger pretty quick, and a lot of fingers started pointing
to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. And in
my experience, wealthy people like to just do what they're
going to do, and if they have to pay some
kind of fine or something later, then so be it. Whatever.
And in this case, it quickly came to light that

(44:45):
what the club had done was made a few unauthorized
alterations to the dam. First off, They didn't like how
peaked the thing looked, so they figured if they just
locked two or three feet off the top, they could
smooth it out and turn it into a kind of
a row way. Basically, they made the bowl shorter, which
made it easier for rising water to overtop it. It

(45:07):
was also originally built with five large cast iron discharge
pipes at the base of the dam to regulate the
lake level and release water. And here's the keyword, safely.
Of course, without them, the club was never going to
be able to properly reduce the lake level. But they'd
already proved that they were going to end up being

(45:28):
absentee landlords as far as actually running the dam goes anyways,
I mean they wanted to own a dam, they didn't
want to run one. I mean, ew gross and for
reasons probably esthetic ones. They had the pipes removed, And
now that I sit here thinking about it, once they
filled that lake with fish, they weren't going to be

(45:49):
wanting any of them to escape. And the only other
way for water to escape, and of course, to prevent
catastrophe in the event of something like this happening, was
a spillway that allowed water to bypass the dam, but
they filled the lake with fish, so they were going
to need fish screens to keep the fish from being
washed away. Of course, the thing about setting up nets
and screens is that they fill up with silt and

(46:12):
driftwood or garbage or whatever over time. But they wanted
to own a spillway, not clean one, I mean ew
and gross, and all the time they owned it, no
qualified civil engineer was ever brought out to inspect the thing,
and any alterations or repairs that they did make were
made by locals, sometime actual club members who wanted to

(46:33):
get their hands dirty when that dam needed patching from
time to time. Instead of proper fill or stone, the
club reportedly used whatever was available, like mud or straw
or brush. I mean they might as well have used newsprint.
And at the time of the disaster, the lake filled
faster than the spillway could handle, and with no outlet
pipes to relieve the pressure, the water overtop the dam

(46:55):
eroded its face and it failed. Actual engineer and hydrologists
had complained bitterly about how vulnerable the South Fork Dam
had become for years, and the locals hoped and assumed
that its wealthy elite owners who could buy and sell
their town a thousand times over would be responsible and
keep them safe. The legal system of the era would

(47:19):
also disappoint this assumption. Many survivors sued for wrongful death
and property damage, but not one succeeded. Despite the deaths
of over twenty two hundred people and the overwhelming evidence
that the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club maybe didn't
cheer it on, but contributed directly to the collapse of

(47:40):
the South Fork Dam, no one was ever criminally charged
or even held financially liable in court. See The laws
of the time required the plaintiffs to prove gross negligence
or intentional wrongdoing. You know, no big deal. All they
had to do was provide irrefutable evidence that the club
actively conspired to purposefully blow up their own dam with

(48:03):
the specific goal of murdering everyone downstream. And even if
they somehow managed to pull off the Sissophian feet. Under
the contributory negligence rule at the time, if any single
individual with a working mouth and a legal background claimed
that rain and or the collapse of the dam was

(48:23):
a quote act of God, the entire membership of the
club would have automatically gotten off the hook. Bottom line.
Somehow the richest men and lawyers in America were able
to figure it all out, and they all got away
with it. After the heat died down and the public
had issued all of their required apologies for their homes

(48:45):
getting in the way of all that damn water, the
club quietly shook hands and disbanded. Some members did actually
pay some charitable reparations, but that's it. Incredibly, the people
of Johnstown began to were built almost immediately. The Cambria Ironworks,
in spite of being mostly destroyed, was at least partially

(49:06):
back up and running only days after the flood. Entire
family lines had been wiped out by the floodwaters. Like
we said, towns up and down the river buried bodies
as they found them, but a full third of the victims,
almost eight hundred, were interred at grand View Cemetery. It
sits on a hillside overlooking Johnstown, and a section of

(49:30):
the grand View Cemetery became the final resting place for
more than seven hundred unidentified victims who were buried in
what became known as the plot of the Unknown and
funny thing about that after the disaster, it got kind
of dry and kind of hot, which is not great
for decomposition. Tack that on to an overwhelming number of

(49:53):
bodies and you would need some fairly large, crowd sized
holes to bury the smell and the whole horror of
bodies melting, rotting, and bloating in the heat. I may
have used the term funny wrong. The mass graves were
for the unidentified, which is what you get when you

(50:14):
consider what might happen to a human skull when pinched
between an oak tree and a fourteen hundred pound spool
of barbed wire. The identified were quickly buried and those
graves stretched for acres. A granite monument was raised and
each May thirty first sirens blare at three po ten

(50:34):
in the afternoon, marking the moment when the dam originally broke.
The dam itself was never rebuilt, and the site was
made into a National Historic Site just seventy five years
later in nineteen sixty four. Today visitors can walk along
the botched remnants of the dam and try to imagine
how much water had been involved. And of course, looking back,

(50:58):
like we said, Pencilvania knows how to flood, and Johnstown
would continue to suffer from floods. Since this one, they've
had at least forty damaging floods, and at least half
a dozen were serious. The most severe were in nineteen
thirty six, where heavy rain and snow melt led to
the deaths of twenty five, and again in nineteen seventy seven,

(51:20):
where a foot of water fell overnight and killed eighty five,
but nowhere close to the carnage and destruction of eighteen
eighty nine. And people remember the eighteen eighty nine flood
for three reasons. First, what it pointed out about our
lack of pre planning a response to a disaster hiding
in plain sight. Second, what it taught us about the

(51:40):
infallibility of the rich and powerful. And believe me, people
did remember that. I mean, some of the members did
support the relief and rebuilding efforts with donations, but still,
this was probably the first time Americans learned that the
elite classes did not necessarily have their best interests in mind,
and it wouldn't be the last. And the third thing

(52:03):
was the enduring resilience and strength of the community in
the face of all this devastation. A laser strike from
space would have caused less damage than this flood, and
yet the people rebuilt within five years. The rebuilding was
so thorough that you wouldn't know that anything had ever happened.
And remember Eliah Sunger, Well, he died in eighteen ninety,

(52:25):
just a single year after the flood, and most people
believe it was the incredible stress and the guilt that
finally got to him. It was only after the nineteen
thirty six flood that the Flood Control Act finally passed
and the US Army Corps of Engineers completed a series
of improvements to protect Johnstown from ever experiencing flooding this

(52:46):
severe ever again. And that nineteen seventy seven flood that
killed eighty people, well it was massive. However, the improvements
that had been made kept the flood level about eleven
feet lower than it would have been without them, and
that is a big deal. What happened here influenced flood
management standards across the country and beyond. And you might think, well,

(53:09):
a lot of places like this lose all their momentum
after a disaster and they never really fully recovered to
become what they could have been. But in Johnstown's case,
they had a bit of both the steel industry did
collapse in the late nineteen hundreds, which should have been
the final nail in the coffin, and did kick Johnstown
in the teeth pretty hard. However, as focuses go, Johnstown

(53:32):
actually pivoted to healthcare and defense contracting as their main
bread and butter. I didn't see it not coming. And
one more very important thing changed. The public backlash over
the court's decision to basically call this an oopsie provided
one of those rare moments in legal history where in
time companies would come to be held liable for this

(53:54):
kind of thing, regardless of intention. It also spurred a
lot of talk about large scale infrastructure being privately owned.
The Johnstown flood would become one of the worst natural
disasters ever seen in the United States. I mean, you
can literally count the number of worst disasters on a

(54:14):
hand with two of its fingers missing. That said, in
my humble opinion, this was a man made disaster through
and through nature just had to tip the bucket, so
to speak. This is also remembered for sparking one of
the first national disaster relief efforts in history. It helps
standardize disaster response, but most tellingly, it would for the

(54:39):
next one hundred and twelve years until the September eleventh,
two thousand and one terrorist attacks in New York City.
The Great Johnstown Flood of eighteen eighty nine would remain
the United States' largest loss of civilian life in a
single day. Now, in the last Patreon segment of this episode,

(55:06):
I've made a fairly bold and personal admission about myself
and my life for the last year and a half.
And why well, you wouldn't think a group of people
who love hearing about people dying terribly would necessarily make
a good kumb bioscracle, And they don't. But they are
supportive of each other, and they're very respectful, and they

(55:28):
enjoy death and tea in equal measure. They're also going
to enjoy the second part of our upcoming fan requested
waffle House Index minisode, where I reveal a hidden connection
with a very special listener who hijack my life with
a dark family secret and who secretly hides among us today.
I tease you this way to entice you to consider

(55:50):
joining the club and help keep the show going. Members
come and they go, and to those who have left
over time, I need you to know that I miss
you but I don't regret the time that we spend together.
I thank you for what you were able to do,
and I completely understand even temporary support is appreciated deeply.

(56:11):
In my perfect world, I just go ahead win the
lottery and I do this for free, full time. But
sadly for me, I live in a country where I
am not able to legally sell my blood or plasma
or sperm, so I am looking for other opportunities. Things
are happening, though. There is one special listener who is
currently setting up a discord for the show and also

(56:33):
supported another free membership that's up for grabs, and I'm
going to be selling my personal library, and I'm also
thinking of buying a T shirt press and getting that going.
If you don't like the idea of your podcast hosts
injuring themselves part time on only fans to get by,
why not consider becoming a supporter of the show. The
best way to support the show is actually to share

(56:55):
the show. But the best way to keep your favorite
host from having a stress related heart attack, well you
could visit buy me a coffee dot com slash doomsday
and make a one time donation. And if you think
getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and
additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it.

(57:16):
You can find out more at Patreon dot com, slash Funeral,
Woo Quick but Heartfelt, shut Out too, Peterson, Nol, Saint Lacrisio,
Wynn Francine, Alabama, Lorii, and Aaron Klassen for helping support

(57:36):
the show on Patreon. I always want to remind you
that there is quite literally no show without you guys.
So for everyone who does enjoy the show, go ahead
and give the Patreon members a small golf clap, and
Patreon members give yourself a big pat on the back.
If you ever want to talk about it or back
injuries or whatever, you can always reach out to me

(57:57):
on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire
an email to doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. Older
episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and
while you're there, please leave us a review and tell
your friends. And I always do thank my Patreon listeners,
new and old, for their support and encouragement. And I

(58:17):
always also say that if you can spare the money
and had to choose, I ask you to consider making
a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid
response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world
to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're
often the first and sometimes only team to get critical

(58:38):
interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date
they have helped over six million people across eighty nine
different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic
dot ca. On the next episode, we are always trying
to find new and unexpected disasters on this show. And

(59:01):
I say to you, lighthouse disaster, and you just sit there,
blinking and naively ask just how much trouble could a
lighthouse get up to. It's the Scotch Cap Lighthouse Disaster
of nineteen forty six. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off
and thanks for listening.

All Episodes

The Great Johnstown Flood Disaster of 1889 | Episode 88

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Great Johnstown Flood Disaster of 1889 | Episode 88