At 3pm on May 31, 1889, after several days of heavy rains, a poorly maintained private dam holding back a two-mile long, 72-foot deep lake broke, sending twenty million tons of water down the south fork of the Little Conemaugh river toward Johnstown, 14 miles downstream. On the way, the wall of water scrubbed trees, rocks, houses, bridges, railroad ties, tracks and cars; and anything else in its path. The wave ranged from 30 to 70 feet tall, depending on the width and straightness of the riverbed, and the obstructions it met. It averaged 40 miles per hour as it mostly decimated the towns of South Fork, Mineral Point and East Conemaugh, killing half the inhabitants of each. Nine steam locomotives were tossed as far as a mile. Woodvale was leveled, including its barbed wire plant, adding miles of barbed wire to the surging wreckage.
When the water reached Johnstown, a city of 10,000 built on the flood plain of three converging rivers, witnesses said they could see no water; just debris at the front of the wall. Three major bridges (steel and masonry) had collapsed and added their bones to the mess, which tore through the town like a battering ram. Whole buildings, parts of buildings, power poles, carriages, people and animals were ingested into the surging mass.
The final and worst disaster was that the Stone Bridge, six segmented stone arches over the (combined) rivers as they left the town, did not fail. The debris formed a 45 acre pile against it; and at 6pm, hot coals and oil caught fire, bringing an even more horrific death to those trapped in the pile. The floating debris pile burned for three days.
Twenty two hundred and nine people died in the flood. Due to the savagery of the rolling debris and the fire (and absence of DNA processing capability), 755 bodies were never identified. Another 700 were never found. Johnstown bodies were found up to 12 years later as far away as Cincinnati, 500 miles away.
We visited both the site of the broken dam and the city of Johnstown, and were struck by the visual absurdity of building a town in a "hole" of three converging valleys and their associated rivers. Today, "town" is almost all businesses; most housing has moved up the substantial hillsides to the plateaus above. As noted above, in spite of massively expensive (federal) flood-prevention measures, there were still major floods in 1936 and 1977, both killing a number of people, although the watermarks on city hall from those floods are only 12 and 17 feet, compared to the 30 foot mark from "the big one". We couldn't decide if the folks who planned Johnstown moved on down to plan New Orleans, or vice-versa.
