Johnstown Flood National Memorial

October 14, 2008

We had a great day today. We started off with our free hotel breakfast and by stealing breakfasts and lunches for the next several days.

We drove ~ 20 minutes north on hwy 219 to Johnstown National Memorial. This was a fascinating site that I don’t think I’ve ever heard of. Before I get into it, the Memorial is $4.00/person over 15 yrs old. They have a wonderful visitors center with a theater, interpretive section, and museum. The whole building, movie, etc., should only take about an hour to go through.

Here’s the story: the Memorial building overlooks where a large man-made lake was in the mid 1800’s. The lake was about 1 mile wide and 2.5 miles long and was owned by a bunch of rich business men from nearby Pittsburg, some of which you may have heard of – Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, etc. They built the lake as a “country get-a-way” – kind of a county resort.

This is where the lake used to be.

Anyway, as the owners, they were in charge of maintaining the earthen dam, which was said to be the biggest in the world at the time. After 1 dam failure in the 1850’s, which wasn’t a big deal, the dam was improperly repaired and safety features were ignored, or eliminated. Anyway, on Memorial Day, 1889, there was torrential, record rainfall after an unusually wet spring. The next day, the dam gave way, releasing tons and tons of water down a narrow gorge formed by the Conamaugh River. At certain narrow points in the river there was a wall of water 75 feet high traveling at 40 miles per hour. The thing about floods is that its not just the water – it’s all the things carried by the water – boulders, trees, houses, anything it can move. Anyway, there were a couple of small towns uphill from Johnsonstown, and in each lots of people were killed, but they had a little better warning. One of these towns was completely wiped out, and by “completely”, I mean there was literally nothing left – the ground was scraped bare to the bedrock. There was no sign of a living thing after this wall of water went through. On its way down the mountain, the flood took out several huge bridges, including rock arch bridges, and even entire trains full of people. 80 ton steam engines were found washed miles away from were they were picked up by the flood.

The main affects were in Johnstown, though, 14 miles downstream of the dam. People there had very little warning and mostly ignored those warnings. This was a big mill and steel town of ~30,000 people at the time, and was particularly badly positioned in a flood plain at the bottom of a steep valley at the confluence of the Conemaugh and another river. The flood hit the town ~40 minutes after the dam break and nearly completely wiped out the town, drowning a lot of people. That’s not the worst of it, though. In town, there is a huge, 7-arch stone bridge. That bridge dammed all of the debris – houses, trees, etc. – it essentially created a 60-acre debris field many feet high. Most of the people that got carried away ended up here floating on and trapped in this debris. The horrific thing is that mixed with all this debris was oil and hot coal and embers from the steel mills. Not a good mixture. The debris field caught on fire, burning many more people while they were trapped in a flood. Pretty scary! The official death toll was 2,209 people, though everyone agrees it was far more than that. The last body was found in 1911 many, many miles away in Cincinnati.

This was Johnstown right before the flood.

Johnstown immediately after the flood.

This was a pretty powerful place. Unfortunately, I’d never heard of this flood.
There is a short walking trail to go to the edge of what remains of the dam, with a pretty view of the valley where the lake used to be. The visitors center is very nice as well with lots of interactive displays that do a very good job of explaining what happened, explaining the timeline, and describing the effects. The only complaint is that the movie was REALLY loud!

The National Memorial buildings from the site of the old dam.

After the park, we drove down the hill to a little community park to have a picnic, then drove around the town briefly and found a couple of the original cottages built by those rich business men along the banks of the lake, which were being restored, than headed up country roads to the next park.

Again, it was just a spectacular drive. The fall colors are amazing. The weather was nice too, though unusually warm – about 20 degrees above average, and very sunny.