A rich men's fishing club lowered the dam above Johnstown
Above the steel town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a group of Pittsburgh industrialists led by Henry Clay Frick turned an old canal reservoir into a private resort lake. They trimmed the dam to fit a carriage road and never replaced its drainage pipes. On May 31, 1889, after record rains, it gave way and 2,208 people died.
The state had built the earthen South Fork Dam between 1838 and 1853 to feed a cross-state canal. When railways made the canal obsolete, the Pennsylvania Railroad bought it and sold the dam and lake to private owners. Frick's group created the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, whose members eventually numbered more than fifty steel, coal and railway magnates, many tied to Carnegie Steel. Their workers cut 3 feet off the top of the dam and fitted a fish screen across the spillway, leaving the club with no means of lowering the lake in an emergency.
Johnstown itself was vulnerable. Founded in 1800 where two rivers meet, it had grown to 30,000 people, many Welsh and German immigrants working in the mills, and slag dumped along the banks had narrowed the riverbed. A storm that formed over Nebraska and Kansas on May 28 dropped an estimated 6 to 10 inches of rain in 24 hours on western Pennsylvania, the heaviest ever recorded there.
On the morning of the disaster, club president Elias Unger saw the lake nearly topping the dam and set men to clear the clogged spillway and raise the crest. Engineer John Parke had telegraph warnings sent from South Fork, but after years of false alarms they never reached Johnstown's authorities. The dam broke shortly before 3 pm, releasing 14.55 million cubic metres of water, and the surge through the narrow valley briefly matched the flow of the Mississippi. Railway engineer John Hess raced his locomotive backwards with its whistle screaming, alerting many people in East Conemaugh.
Clara Barton led the young American Red Cross in relief, and aid arrived from 18 countries. Survivors lost their lawsuits against the club, which later helped push American law toward holding owners liable even without proof of fault.
Source: Johnstown Flood
