- Antone Pierucci
- Posted On
This Week in History: The 1889 disaster at Johnstown, Pennsylvania
As we approach the summer months in California, all of us begin looking anxiously at the rivers and creeks, reservoirs and canals.
It is an annual ceremony, with news programs providing coverage of California Drought Watch (Insert Year Here).
Whether we like it or not, California is an arid state with a disproportionate part of it receiving most of the snow and rainfall.
Ever since the Gold Rush, immigrants to this state have recognized the importance of controlling – and owning – access to this precious resource.
As the decades went on, the water projects grew to spectacular proportions.
The largest and most ambitious was the Central Valley Project, an act passed in 1933 that authorized the construction of canals and reservoirs to store and transfer water from Lake Shasta in Northern California to Bakersfield in the southern San Joaquin Valley. Today, 20 percent of the state’s water passes through this massive system.
Just three years ago, Californians voted for Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion bond measure that will fund the construction of even more water projects including dams and reservoirs throughout the state.
After decades of such publicly-funded projects, California has nearly 1,500 reservoirs that helps water its cities during the dry summer months.
This is all well and good, until you realize that half of California’s dams are more than 50 years old. That means that millions of acre-feet of water are stored behind aging, crumbling concrete and rebar.
Last year’s Oroville Dam crisis, which caused the evacuation of nearly 200,000 residents, woke many up to the sad reality of our state water infrastructure. The hope is that we do not require another lesson before we act.
But if one is needed, we can look to the past.
On May 31, 1889, 2,295 people were killed when the dam above the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania broke asunder.
It started in the morning. Businessmen on their way to work stepped out into streets of water. Concerned housewives began moving furniture and other valuables to second stories shortly thereafter.
Johnstown had been built in a river basin in the Appalachian Plateau. Two rivers ran along one side of the town to form at the end the Conemaugh River. Every year heavy rains would see the rivers jump their banks and send the citizens of Conemaugh scurrying for higher ground.
As the morning passed to the afternoon on May 31, 1899, many residents were holed up in their second story, as they had done many times before.
Even as Johnstown settled in for a long wait, 14 miles above the city at South Fork Dam, workers were frantic. The dam held back the Lake Conemaugh, a pleasure lake for the wealthy to fish and boat on – claiming such men as Andrew Carnegie among its member rolls.
Officials at the dam were worried it wouldn’t hold back the water. They tried everything they knew how: they tried to raise the level of the dam, tried to dig a new spillway to relieve pressure on the breast of the dam and finally releasing the gates that were keeping the stocked fish from escaping downstream.
But at around 3 p.m., the workers stood aghast as the damn just … floated away.
A wall of water 40 feet high and half a mile wide – estimated by engineers to be travelling with the force of Niagara Falls – swept the 14 miles downstream to the helpless citizens of Johnstown.
A ground-shaking roar and a flash of muddy blue was all that most saw of the tidal wave before washing away with its violent passing. Some survived, marooned on doors or mattresses and careening down the river basin.
Downriver, at the Pennsylvania Railroad Co.’s Stone Bridge, debris from the town piled up some 40 feet high and over 30 acres before catching fire and killing any unlucky survivors who still clung for dear life.
The whole affair didn’t last long, the raging water scouring the floor and walls of the basin of any evidence of human habitation before subsiding and continuing on its natural course.
Despite the national attention the flood received, no legislation was passed to help prevent a similar disaster from happening to the people again.
Some tried suing the club who had built the dam for its members’ fishing and boating pleasure. The courts struck the suits down, claiming that the failing of the dam had been an act of God.
Let’s hope another “act of God” isn’t coming down the chute – or, to be more precise, down the valley from the nearest crumbling dam.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.