Lee Wolverton: Lessons of the Johnstown flood remain

Spring waters around Johnstown already were swollen. Fourteen inches of snow fell April 6 and melted soon thereafter. Then came eight additional days of rain before month’s end.

Advancing across the nation’s midsection, the storm crackled with fury, dumping rain and spawning tornadoes that tore trees from the earth and splintered homes. The system reached central West Virginia at 1 a.m. May 30, 1889. At 11 p.m., as the people of Johnstown slept, the skies opened. They would call it “The Day It Rained Forever.”

All of Pennsylvania was engulfed by the great storm. Swaths reaching from Harrisburg to Johnstown and McConnellsburg to Tioga were hit hardest. The U.S. Army Signal Corps pegged the totals at 6 to 10 inches in just 24 hours. The timing for Johnstown could hardly have been worse.

Creeks raged, toppling telegraph lines, yanking trees from the saturated soil and pulling rail lines into the waters’ gushing wake. The Conemaugh River roared to its banks. And the South Fork Dam trembled.

Built in fits and starts from 1838 to 1853, the earthen barrier stretched 72 feet high and measured 918 feet in length, 10 feet in width at its crest and 220 feet in width at its base. Crews constructed a stone-lined culvert featuring five valves to control water flow, and a spillway was carved into rock along the structure’s eastern abutment.

Set eight miles east of Johnstown, South Fork was intended for use as a reservoir for a division of the Pennsylvania Canal, but by the time it was completed, it had been made obsolete by the Pennsylvania Railroad’s extension of service from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. The state sold to the railroad its Main Line Canal, along with the dam, in 1857. By the close of the century, use of the canal was discontinued.

Congressman John Reilly, a railroad employee, bought the dam in 1875, removed the five sluice pipes at its base and sold them for scrap. A sag at the top of the barrier deepened and the path to destruction widened.

By Memorial Day 1889, ownership of the dam had changed hands and its original purpose had transformed from use in the transport of freight to holding water for Lake Conemaugh, the centerpiece of a playground for magnates Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick and nearly five dozen others.

They constructed cottages and a clubhouse under the auspices of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club but paid little heed to the deteriorating dam. Crews repaired the culvert, the late David McCullough writes in “The Johnstown Flood,” by boarding it and “dumping in every manner of local rock, mud, brush, hemlock boughs, hay, just about everything at hand. Even horse manure was used in some quantity.”

At roughly 3:10 p.m., the dam broke. Some 3.6 billion gallons of water careened toward Johnstown. The wave from the initial burst reached 30 feet high and stretched as wide as the Mississippi. The savage torrent, according to author Erin Blakemore, was three times more powerful than Niagara Falls, thundering through the countryside at 40 mph, sweeping away 170,000-pound locomotives and killing 99 entire families.

It remains among the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, although it was decidedly unnatural. It was manmade, a product of man’s inhuman disregard for others, of the utter absence of even ordinary empathy. The dam had been soundly engineered but poorly maintained. Survivors got nothing in the courts. The industrialists who built massive, sprawling factories that showered them in wealth and Pittsburgh in darkness contended their negligence of a simple earthen dam couldn’t be proved.

Laws differ today, but the idea expressed by the flood and its aftermath endures: that humans walk an uneven line, rules applying to many but rarely or never to a few, and geographical communities and the larger community of mankind suffer for this. Acceptance of responsibility by those who could escape it is the tonic, but it only cures once wholly imbibed.