Free The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough Page B

Johnstown there would be talk about the dam breaking. One longtime resident was later quoted at length in the newspapers in New York and elsewhere: “We were afraid of that lake…. No one could see the immense height to which that artificial dam had been built without fearing the tremendous power of the water behind it…doubt if there is a man or a woman in Johnstown who at sometime or other had not feared and spoken of the terrible disaster that might ensue. People wondered and asked why the dam was not strengthened, as it certainly had become weak; but nothing was done, and by and by they talked less and less about it…” He also evidently had misgivings about the “tremendous power” of the men who had owned the dam, for he chose to withhold his name.
    Others came forth at the same time, that is, after May 31, 1889, claiming to have long held doubts about the engineering of the dam, and premonitions of doom for the whole valley of the Conemaugh. Assuredly most of them spoke from deep conviction; but exactly how much widespread, serious, public concern there was, and particularly in the years of the late ’80’s, is very hard to say.
    Certainly there was every reason to have been concerned. The valley from the lake down to Johnstown had sides as steep as a sluice, and there was only one way the water could go if the dam failed. Floods hit the area almost as regularly as spring itself. Johnstown rarely got through a year without water in the streets at least once, and often for several days at a time.
    Floods had been a problem from the time of the very earliest settlements in the valley. Lately, for the past ten years or so, they had been getting worse.
    The very first flood anyone had bothered to make a record of in Johnstown destroyed a dam. That was in 1808, and it had been only a small dam across the Stony Creek which had been put in as a millrace for one of the first forges. Then there were the so-called Pumpkin Floods of a dozen years later. They hit in the fall and had swept what looked like every pumpkin in Cambria County down into town. In 1847 another little dam on the Stony Creek broke. During the flood of 1875 the Conemaugh rose two feet in a single hour. In 1880 again another dam broke; it had been built by Cambria Iron as a feeder for the mills and was about sixteen feet high, but it was located below town, so no damage was caused. During the next eight years there were seven floods, including three bad ones in 1885, ‘87, and ‘88.
    The reasons were obvious enough to anyone who took the time to think about the problem, which quite a few were doing by 1889. With the valley crowding up the way it was, the need for lumber and land was growing apace. As a result more and more timber was being stripped off the mountains and near hills, and in Johnstown the river channels were being narrowed to make room for new buildings and, in several places, to make it easier to put bridges across.
    Forests not only retain enormous amounts of water in the soil (about 800 tons per acre), but in mountainous country especially, they hold the soil itself, and in winter they hold snow. Where the forests were destroyed, spring thaws and summer thunderstorms would send torrents racing down the mountainsides; and each year the torrents grew worse as the water itself tore away at the soil and what little ground cover there was left. Then, in the valley, where the water was being dumped ever more suddenly, the size of rivers which had to carry it all was being steadily whittled away at by industry and the growing population. So there was always a little less river to handle more runoff, and flash floods were the inevitable result.
    Some men in Johnstown, curiously enough, thought that encroaching on the river channels would simply force the water to dig deeper channels. But this was impossible because the river beds were nearly all rock. When the volume of water increased, the rivers only came up, and often very fast. In the