Johnstown Flood of 1889

On May 30th, 1889, a violent storm rolled through Johnstown Pennsylvania, a mere 60 miles east of Pittsburgh. The next morning there was minor flooding, but 15 miles above the city, in the Allegheny Mountains, trouble was brewing at a 450-acre manmade lake owned by the exclusive New South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club.

Who Caused the Johnstown Flood?

The New South Fork Fishing and Hunting club had hastily rebuilt a fifty-year-old dam to create the lake for its club members, which was patronized Gilded Age tycoons such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon. Despite repeated concerns voiced by local engineers, club members had done nothing to maintain the dam.

At about 3:15 in the afternoon of May 31st, the dam gave way, releasing over twenty million tons of water as it drained the lake over the next forty-five minutes of disaster.

Johnstown Flood Outcomes

The water roared down the mountainside at speeds upwards of forty miles an hour, carrying away trees, telephone poles and anything in its path. The wall of water slammed into Johnstown just before 4 PM, washing away people and livestock, while destroying 1,500 homes and businesses.

In a devastating ten-minute assault, the entire city was uprooted and destroyed. The official death toll was 2,209 unlucky people. Makeshift morgues were set up around the city, but hundreds of the missing were never found, while a third of the recovered bodies were never identified.

Word of the disaster soon reached the outside world, and relief workers came to the aid of the battered survivors. The first order of business was to rebuild the rail lines, so that food, clothing and tents could reach the city.

It was the first crisis handled by Clara Barton and her newly-formed American Red Cross. She and her cadre of volunteer nurses would render aid and solace to the community of Johnstown for the next five months to come, helping to establish the American Red Cross as the premier disaster relief agency in the United States.

While newspapers began to point fingers at the South Fork Club’s failure to maintain the dam, in the end, club members were never held legally responsible.