The Johnstown Flood: The Millionaires Who Broke the Dam

The Johnstown Flood: The Millionaires Who Broke the Dam A private fishing club owned the dam above Johnstown, Pennsylvania. When it broke on 31 May 1889 it killed more than two thousand people in about ten minutes, and not one member of that club ever paid a dollar for it. The members included Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, and Philander Knox — later Attorney General of the United States, and also one of the lawyers who defended the club against the four lawsuits brought after the flood. Every case was settled or discontinued. So far as anyone has established, nobody who sued recovered anything. The defence was that the storm had been an act of God. In 1891 a committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers examined the wreckage and agreed: the dam would have failed even if it had been left exactly as built. That finding stood for a hundred and twenty-five years. What the club had actually done to the dam is a list of four things, and the film goes through them one at a time. It repaired an 1862 breach with fill that was never properly compacted. It lowered the crest to widen the carriage road across the top. It never replaced the five cast-iron discharge pipes a previous owner had removed and sold for scrap, so there was no way to lower the lake deliberately. And it screened the spillway, and built a bridge over it, to stop the stocked fish escaping. There was a fifth thing too, almost unnoticed for a century: the original dam had an auxiliary emergency spillway, and the rebuild left it out. They were warned. Daniel Johnson Morrell, who ran the Cambria Iron Works down in the valley, was worried enough that he bought his way into the club in order to have standing to argue with it, and sent his own engineer, John Fulton, to inspect the work in 1880. Fulton reported it unsound. The club's president replied that the dam was safe and the engineer was mistaken. Morrell died in 1885, four years before it broke. In 2016 three geologists — Neil Coleman, Uldis Kaktins and Stephanie Wojno — rebuilt the dam from published laser survey data and ran the storm against it again. They found the 1880 repair had lowered the crest by at least a metre, that removing the base pipes cut the dam's safe discharge capacity roughly in half, and that the dam as originally built would have survived. Not comfortably. But it would have held. The water went over the top of that embankment because the top had been lowered to make room for a carriage road. This film does not argue the 1891 report was a fix. What is true is narrower and worse: engineers objected to its figures at the society's own 1891 convention and were overruled, and the most detailed modern demolition of that report is now published by the ASCE itself. CHAPTERS 0:00 The hook 1:15 The town at the bottom 3:03 A dam for a canal that no longer existed 5:12 The club 8:09 The man who tried 9:57 The thirty-first of May 12:59 The bridge 14:00 What came after 15:28 Nobody paid 18:53 A hundred and twenty-five years later 20:36 Close Twelfth film in a series on Gilded Age America. Same method as the rest: the official version, then the documents. SOURCES David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood (1968). Coleman, Kaktins and Wojno, "Dam-breach hydrology of the Johnstown flood of 1889 — challenging the findings of the 1891 investigation report", Heliyon, 16 June 2016. The 1891 ASCE committee report, and the ASCE Geo-Institute's own re-examination of it. National Park Service records for the South Fork Dam. Casualty figures from the Johnstown Area Heritage Association. On the death toll: the National Park Service gives 2,209. The figure was later corrected to 2,208, when a man named Leroy Temple, counted among the dead, turned out to have walked away and started again somewhere else. The film gives both, and why they differ. IMAGE CREDITS Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Much of the Johnstown coverage was published as stereoscopic cards; those are shown cropped to a single frame. Most used: Ruins of Johnstown / Bridge and ruins / Ruins from the bridge / Cambria Iron Works / Conemaugh River — Webster & Albee, Rochester Debris at the P.R.R. stone bridge — Ernest Walter Histed, 31 May 1889 Great Stone Bridge after the fire, and a B. & O. box car lodged in the debris — Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views Daniel Johnson Morrell — Brady-Handy Collection Clara Barton's headquarters and Red Cross Hotel No. 3, Johnstown, 1889 Portraits of Carnegie, Frick, Mellon and Knox Present-day photographs of the South Fork Dam remains, used only where the narration describes the site as it stands now #JohnstownFlood #History #GildedAge