This memorial at Grandview Cemetery in the Pennsylvanian steel town of Johnstown commemorates the flood of 1889. As you can see, hundreds of tombstones mark the anonymous dead, and there were hundreds more besides — 2,208 to be exact, making it one of the worst national disasters in USA history. Visiting the memorial is a sobering experience, but understanding the causes of the flood is an enraging one.
When the South Fork Dam broke on the night of May 31, 14.55 million cubic meters of water – enough to equal the flood rate of the Mississippi River – drained the attached reservoir and barreled 14 miles downstream into the industrial steel town of Johnstown. The 30,000 inhabitants were mainly from Welsh and German immigrant families who had settled in the city, which was nestled in a narrow valley framed by steep hills. Messages to warn the population about the oncoming waters failed to get through, and those who died did so in gruesome ways, slammed by the pressure of the water, some tangled in barbed wire from a manufacturing plant, others burning in debris caused as machinery caught fire amidst the chaos.
While the heavy rainfall and unfortunate location of Johnstown certainly played a role in the casualties, a more immediate cause of the flood was due to oligarchs who had built a faulty dam that served their own greed. Wanting a fishing reservoir, a group of wealthy Pittsburgh businessmen — many who were connected to Carnegie Steel — bought the dam from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania after the state realized it no longer could serve the capacity needed. Instead of improving it, the new rich owners actually lowered the dam so that carriages could cross more easily. Wanting to make sure the fishing supply remained high, they plugged up spillway protections. They raised the water levels higher on purpose. And they never consulted any civil engineers when making the changes.
When people around the world read the headlines of the tragedy, help poured in with volunteers and funding. But the real authors of the tragedy, members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, never admitted their complicity.
