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Chapter 8. Monday, May 1, 1989
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201 T H E J O H N S T O W N G I R L S Monday, May 1, 1989 Structural Faults Led to Great Flood What Went Wrong Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD SERIES BY BEN BRAGDON On May 31, 1889, a forty-foot wall of water and debris sped down the mountain from South Fork into the valley that is Johnstown. It hit the city just before 4:10 p.m. More than 2,200 people died and the town was almost completely unrecognizable. George Swank, an editor of a local newspaper, wrote: “We think we know what struck us, and it was not the hand of Providence . Our misery is the work of man.” One problem was that the townspeople had heard warnings for several years that the dam was unreliable and might break. They became so used to those warnings that even on the day of the flood, those in the telegraph office measured the danger by the level of water in their own offices—only a few inches. If warnings had been heeded, some of the disaster might have been averted. But ordinary citizens fretting about water on their first floors were not the culprits Swank referred to. There 202 K AT H L E E N G E O R G E were sixty-one members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club to blame, sixteen of them wealthy industrialists with big names. Many were politically connected. Attorney Philander Knox would become attorney general to presidents McKinley and Roosevelt and also would be secretary of state to Taft. John Leishman would serve as a U.S. ambassador. Andrew Mellon would become secretary of the treasury under no less than three presidents: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The lake that was the centerpiece of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club had once been a canal feeder for the waterway systems of transport. When trains took over the same work of transporting goods and passengers, the canal feeder stood idle. Benjamin Ruff purchased the canal from a congressman who had purchased it from the state. Ruff saw the potential of the idle body of water and its dam. It looked to him like a perfect setting. He began to spin the idea of a resort lake and a club for exclusive members. He approached fifteen wealthy Pittsburghers and sold them shares. The lake was only viable as a lake because the space that held the water had been dammed up. Work had begun in 1838 on this body of water, a canal feeder, more than forty years before the flood. The earthen dam was 850 feet in length and it was planned in such a way as to have adequate spillways. Engineers specified that it should be 62 feet high. It would take, they thought, a year to build. They were wrong. Because of delays having to do with both finances and illnesses, the whole project was not completed for fourteen years. The dam followed current practice for such structures and was deemed competently done. Specifications were made so that spillways were secure and that no water ever came over the top. As a civic project the canal feeder was doomed. Progress got in the way. Railroads, the new means of industrial transport, took over and the canal basin stood idle. The dam broke once before 1889. In 1862 heavy thunderstorms caused spillage and the cause was found to be a portion of faulty foundation. The blame went to local citizens who were believed to be stealing lead from the pipe joints. That early break in the dam caused little actual damage and perhaps inured inspectors for years afterward. [54.173.214.79] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:57 GMT) 203 T H E J O H N S T O W N G I R L S For years the lake, the former canal, had only a low level of water and in some places the lake bed was actually bared. When Congressman Reilly sold the lake to Benjamin Ruff, he took a loss on his own purchase price. Perhaps he aimed to recoup some of his loss by removing the old cast-iron discharge pipes and selling them. He is believed to have done so. Ruff repaired the dam by blocking the stone culvert and using whatever he could find to make a wall: rocks, plants, boughs of trees, waste of all kinds, including manure. Heavy rains ruined these...