From Nepal to Johnstown: The Echo of Deadly Floods

Most Americans can’t imagine the kind of glacier-related flooding that wiped out whole towns in Nepal, killing more than 1,000 and causing $5 billion in damage.

It wouldn’t be unimaginable, however, to 19th-century residents of Johnstown, Pa. The small city about a 90-minute drive east of Pittsburgh was hit by an infamous flood in 1889 that killed more than 2,200.

“It looked like a large hill rolling over and over; it seemed to me about a hundred feet high,” survivor S. W. Keltz recounted back then.

Nowadays, global warming is being blamed for events like the Nepal disaster, which scientists have traced to the collapse of a segment of glacier into a steep river valley below.

Fortunately, most Americans live far from the danger of a glacier collapse. Residents of Juneau, Alaska, located 12 miles from fast-melting Mendenhall Glacier, are an exception.

Johnstown was on the cutting edge of the American industrial revolution in 1889. Business was drawn to the steep Conemaugh Valley first for salt, then coal, then steelmaking. The Cambria Iron Co. of Johnstown was one of the nation’s largest and most advanced producers.

People were busy at work between 2:50 p.m. and 2:55 p.m., when, 14 miles upstream from Johnstown, after days of heavy rains, the old South Fork Dam collapsed.

The steep ravines of the Allegheny Mountains don’t compare with the mighty Himalayas of Nepal. But a wall of water—14.55 million cubic meters, the capacity of 5,820 Olympic swimming pools—suddenly began racing down the steep Conemaugh Valley.

The flood wiped out the towns of South Fork, Mineral Point and East Conemaugh, and swept through the Cambria Iron works before reaching Johnstown proper, 57 minutes after it began.

“We didn’t see it but we heard the noise of it coming,” said train engineer J.C. Hess, one of a number of witnesses interviewed by the Pennsylvania Railroad. “It was like a hurricane through a wooded country. It was a roar and a crash and a smash.”

A.H. Lytle, another witness, spotted it roaring down the valley. “It looked to me as if a mountain was coming,” he said.

C.A. Warthen watched it go by.

“[I]t was taking everything before it, trees, houses, logs, and everything else shooting up out of it,” he said. “It looked fearful frightful.”

The Johnstown Flood was front-page news across the country.

“The Most Frightful Disaster Recorded in National History,” wrote the Daily Inter Mountain of Butte, Mont., the next day. “Wreck and Ruin.”

The official death count was put at 2,208 after one man, listed as dead, returned 11 years later fully intact. Some 1,600 homes along with commercial districts, industrial sites, bridges, roads and railroads were destroyed, at an estimated total cost of $17 million.

That converts to around $600 million today, a low total that reflects a less capital-intensive time, not the human toll that shocked the world.

“For Humanity’s Sake: The Citizens of Nashville Will Respond Nobly,” the Daily American of that Tennessee city wrote on June 4, 1889, reporting that $700 in contributions for flood victims had already been received.

The city of Paris donated 5,000 francs to relief efforts. Britain’s Queen Victoria dispatched a diplomat to President Benjamin Harrison with a message of sympathy.

Johnstown did rebuild. But only after another devastating flood, in 1936, did the Army Corps of Engineers surround the city with modern defenses, declaring it “flood free.”

It was flood free, for 40 years, until another dam collapse triggered the Johnstown flood of July 20, 1977.

“Today, it was worse than the flood of 1936,” said one county official.

The contours of the land make flooding a perpetual threat in the Conemaugh Valley, just as New Orleans’ placement—sinking into the middle of a delta—makes water the eternal enemy. Other low-lying cities like Miami and New York City also remain at risk.

If we choose to live in these places, we must defend them.

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