If you are from PA or have friends and family from PA then you have probably heard about the catastrophic dam failure that led to the death of so many Johnstown residents.
On Friday May 31, 1889 after several rainy days the South Fork dam gave way and unleashed on the town below. The dam expelled 14.55 million gallons of water, killed 2,208 people and caused over 17 million (in 1889 currency rates) in financial damages. In today's market that would be over 580 million dollars.
Johnstown is in an area prone to flooding. The town itself was built specifically to accommodate workers during the booming Pennsylvania industrial age of the 1800's. For some geographical reference, Stony Creek comes together with the Little Conemaugh River to form the Conemaugh River. The Allegheney Mountains and narrow Conemaugh Valley also limited the area where Johnstown could be built. Given the terrain, Johnstown was forced to be built close to the river front.
(NPS Map)
Between 1838 and 1853 the Commonwealth of PA constructed the South Fork dam. The purpose of the dam was to be a part of a canal system called the Mainline of Public Works. The canal was built to transport freight between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The canal was later replaced by the Pennsylvania Rail Road (PRR). The entire history of the canal is a separate topic all on it's own, and fascinating to read should you have the time to do so.
Another import reference point for you to understand this disaster is Lake Conemaugh. Lake Conemaugh was the reservoir behind the doomed South Fork Dam.
South Fork dam was 72 feet high and 931 feet long. You may also be surprised to know that the South Fork dam was an earthen dam. This means it was constructed from soil and rock materials such as clay, silt, sand and gravel. Unfortunately, for the inhabitants of Johnstown, the development of geothechnical engineering was still decades away.
Based on eye witness accounts today's modern geotechnical engineers have termed the South Fork dam failure as an overtopping failure. More on that later.
Prior to the catastrophic failure the dam needed repairs, and regular maintenance. The dam was prone to leaking. The reasons for such poor maintenance will become more apparent as you continue to read. For purposes of clarity there are some key people you should have an understanding of. One such person being Benjamin Ruff, and his presidency of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing club. Ruff and his peers had more money than God and worked together to establish a resort for the elite. Ruff involved no one that was knowledgeable in civil engineering principles and choose to direct the work himself. Every decision Ruff made was based on money. Ruff's crews removed discharge pipes, lowered the crest, and reduced the auxiliary spillway. They added fish screens that blocked debris and haphazardly filled in an old breach from 1862. All the while, the Little Conemaugh wasn't diverted and continued to fill the lake while the dam was being built.
In 1862(during the civil war), while the dam was under previous ownership, there had been a breach of the dam that resulted in the poor placement of fill being added to the dam to fill the breach. The breach created a shear plane in the center of the dam. Consolidation of the fill led to the wall of the dam starting to sag, which only increased over time, thus effecting the capacity of the reservoir and peak discharge of the spillway. Other factors also continued to weaken the dam such as smaller rip-rap being used as fill. New leaks continued appearing and the integrity of the dam grew weaker over time.
Ruff's crews finished the dam in 1881 around June. The elite South Fork Fishing and Hunting club was now officially open for business.
Johnstown residents had grown used to the flooding, the flooding became part of being a riverfront town. The floods became worse over time as lumber was harvested from the surrounding forests. There were even developers who were filling the rivers in an attempt to create more valuable real estate. The smaller river channels now had to handle more runoff, and at higher volumes. We can all see the recipe for disaster that was written here can't we?
For years leading up to the 1889 disaster the rivers had been flooding Johnstown each spring, it became normal for those living there. In fact there were seven separate significant floods leading up to the disaster in previous years.
On the eve of the disaster most were busy celebrating what we now call "Memorial Day". As the rain moved in, the festivities of what was then called "Decoration Day" came to an end. A storm system from California that had drenched the country in it's path to Pennsylvania was about to strike. In 1889 the US Army Signal Corps were responsible for monitoring the weather across the country. The California storm system then collided with two additional storm systems that were advancing north. Another storm system off the Eastern Seaboard added to the culmination of a storm cluster. The storm cluster then hovered right over the Allegheney Mountains, leaving Lake Conemaugh more vulnerable than ever. This was considered to be a once in 100 years kind of weather event.
If you can believe it, checking the weather was not part of standard operating procedure for being a dam operator in 1889. In combination with the previous removal of the discharge outlet (a decision made by Benjamin Ruff, the 1st president of the South Fork Hunting & Fishing club), there was little that could have been done by 22 year old John Parke. John Parke was supervising a sanitary sewer line build for nearby facilities at the time of the catastrophic failure. Parke did not hold a degree, but was considered to be a trained civil engineer after studying for three years. Parke held the highest level of training out of any of those who had been involved with building the South Fork Dam. When Parke stopped working that night, even if he had been aware that a once in one hundred year storm was about to strike, Parke had no means of avoiding the disaster. After years of bad decisions made by unqualified, greedy people, Parke would have needed to be capable of an act of God to avoid the disaster.
On May 31st 1889, when the storm struck, it didn't take long for the citizens to realize they were in serious trouble. A landslide, several inches of non stop rain, and rising rivers were just some of the early clues of the impending disaster. In fact, the rivers were rising at 1 foot per hour. Downtown Johnstown had two to ten feet of water in it by noon that day, forcing downtown residents seek refuge on higher grounds. Closer to the South Fork dam even more rain fell according to eyewitness accounts. Every stream and creek was rushing and flowing into Lake Conemaugh.
The lake was rising fast and the only way to relieve the lake was by using the truncated screen spillway to lower the water levels in the lake. Parke and his sewer crew realized the potential for disaster and feverishly got to work trying to do what they could to make sure the dam held. Some used picks to deepen the auxiliary spillway and some used horses and plows to plow over the crest of the dams dwindling freeboard.
The storms and the rain slowed but the creeks and streams rushing into Lake Conemaugh were still rising. Their discharge hadn't peaked. Debris like timber began to block fish screens and the spillway, making it even more difficult for the rising water to escape. New leaks began appearing in the dam and the emergency trench the men dug in the auxiliary spillway was overwhelmed. By 11:30 AM the lake began overtopping the doomed South Fork Dam.
John Parke left the dam to send a telegraph warning message. After riding his horse for some distance he enlisted the help of two other men to complete his mission for a warning message to be sent down the valley and to the PRR. Others who could have helped spread the message left town as fast as they could with no regard for others, Robert Pitcarin, PRR executive and club member was one such notable coward. When Parke returned to the dam he found more than one foot of water overtopping it and eroding away everything in it's path.
Parke becomes hopeful the situation was not going to get any worse based on the level of the lake now becoming static. Parke put aside any drastic diversionary measures he may have had in mind and actually went to lunch. When Parke returned from lunch he found a ten foot wide, four foot deep headcut in the downstream face of the dam.
At this point Parke, Col. Unger (2nd president of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club) and others, just watch as the cut migrates, likely in sheer horror. Due to the poor methods of Ruff back in 1862 just having fill dumped into the dam during it's reconstruction, the cut migrated until it reached a full breach at 2:50 PM. Moments later the center wall of the dam appeared to give way unleashing an unstoppable and unfathomable amount of water into Johnstown.
Photo from NPS
The water hit Johnstown like a freight train, for those on the ground it must have been like watching a tsunami coming straight at you. It took an estimated 65 minutes for the lake to drain low enough that it no longer spilled over the breach. The lake dropped roughly eight inches every minute. The wave crashed through the valley with lethal force to everything in its path. The water reached speeds of up to 40 mph and the hydrodynamics worked in a violent top over bottom loop. The flood traveled the valley for 14 horrific miles, tearing up infrastructure and taking lives.
A newly built rail road bridge in Johnstown named Stone Bridge, with seven arch ways, became damed with debris. The debris included everything from logs, homes, vehicles, and buildings to people and animals that were dead, and some that were alive. This meant there were burning open flame furnaces, lamps and other hazardous materials all trapped together. This lead to a fire breaking out in the debris by approximately 6PM that fateful evening, incinerating of the all poor souls trapped in the wreckage.
The deaths tallied up to about three thousand when final count was done. This number includes those who were injured in the disaster and later died as a result of those injuries. It also includes those who may have contracted a disease because of the disaster. Human remains from the disaster were discovered for years after, as late as 1911, and had been washed down river all the way to Cincinnati.
Those who survived had to carry significant psychological trauma with them in a time when little was known about mental health. Following the disaster a Typhoid epidemic broke out. Much humanitarian aid was sent to the disaster area from all over the country.
What happened in politics afterward seems to be a timeless story we are all too familiar with. The rich and powerful aren't held accountable while the members of society that work hard for an honest living are trampled on, chewed up, spit out and forgotten. One writer put it perfectly when they said, “All of the horrors that hell could wish,” ; “such was the price that was paid for – fish!” The club and its former careless leader Benjamin Ruff were front and center in the news, openly displayed for the public's wrath.
One of the legal advances that came from the disaster was the creation of strict liability after nearly all lawsuits filed after the disaster were lost by the plaintiffs. The full historical saga of all the fall out from the disaster is long and sordid. It involves corruption, cover ups and morally bankrupt people with money and power. Sadly the 1889 disaster was not the last flood that Johnstown would ever see. In 1936 there was a significant flood that killed 24 people and in 1977 there was another flood that included a dam breach with the loss of life. The 1977 dam breach was of the Laurel Run dam and it killed about 80 people.
Should you take a trip to Johnstown today you can still see the remnants of the South Fork dam and clearly imagine the horrors of the tragedy.
Much information for this post was gathered from the Geo Institute and their 5 part publication on the "Johnstown Flood 1889: A Catastrophe of Civil Engineering".
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