Keystone Tour

On May 31, 1889, 2,209 people lost their lives as a forty-foot wall of water swept through Johnstown following the collapse of the South Fork Dam, 14 miles upstream. People died in horrific ways - not just drowned, but crushed by debris, and worst of all, burned alive, as debris and people were trapped against the stone railroad bridge below town - and then the debris caught on fire. 27,000 people were left homeless. The flood also washed away over twenty miles of the Pennsylvania Railroad's main line, the only significant supply line to the area. Given the massive number of corpses scattered everywhere (Johnstown dead were recovered as far away as Cincinnati, 500 miles downstream), the risk of epidemic was huge.

In an era where FEMA and government disaster relief didn't exist, donations poured in from every state and dozens of countries - enough aid to avert a second wave of fatalities and disease. Johnstown was the first scale effort for the Red Cross, and it mobilized food and sanitation. Johnstown buried its dead, rebuilt, and today leans into its legacy as "Flood City".

Those are the historical facts. But: WHY did this happen? WHAT changed as a result? And, of course - what is Johnstown like today?

My starting point was David McCulloch's "The Johnstown Flood", his first book. Our visit to the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, which overlooks the failed dam, filled in details. Disconnected decisions led to disaster:

Johnstown sits in a floodplain. See my photo below looking down at the town. Johnstown had experienced floods in six of the ten years before "the big one".
The dam was built to support the canal system that predated the railroad. It fell into disuse, ultimately failed, but caused no damage because its spillway and drainage ports ensured there was little water released on failure.
Twenty years later, the wealthy industrialists of Pittsburgh, having polluted the air and water of their home city, wanted a summer getaway spot from the city's heat, noise and smoke. They formed an elite club that rebuilt South Fork Dam, creating a lakeside fishing and boating resort.
In rebuilding the dam, they made modifications - blocking the spillway (so their stocked fish couldn't escape), lowering the dam (to allow room for carriages to pass each other) and not replacing the emergency drainage pipes. Oh - and deciding to fill the dam much beyond the original design - after all, bigger lakes are better than smaller ones.
Over the next decade, there were many warnings about the dam's safety. But - the dam was fine, there was a "boy who cried wolf" sense of complacence in town.
Fatally, a rainstorm that dumped nine inches of rain in 24 hours flowed so much water into the lake that (combined with the removed drainage and blocked spillway) the dam was overrun with water, which quickly eroded the earthwork - and the wall of water poured down the valley
Several warnings were sent to the town via telegraph, but they were ignored. "yeah, the dam is gonna burst, we've heard that one before"
Hundreds of lawsuits were filed against the club and the Pittsburgh elite that were its members. All were dismissed: "this was force majeure, an Act of God" - no responsibility. That could never happen today, right? (Andrew Carnegie did contribute a library to Johnstown after the flood, just as he did to Homestead after breaking the strike there).

What changed? Well, basically nothing. Johnstown rebuilt and went back to being a second-tier steel making city that experienced the "regular floods" that came with being located in a floodplain. (The 1936 and 1977 floods both buried Johnstown under eight feet of water). Absent the catastrophic event that befell Kaskaskia, people have a strong predisposition to rebuild where it was convenient to build the first time. See: New Orleans, Florida, and we will see the same in California after the next "Big One".

Johnstown today? Sadly - it's in rough shape. Johnstown was a steel making town. Pittsburgh, blessed by great transportation and universities (Pitt, CMU), has been able to reinvent itself into a health care and engineering city, and has turned its abandoned mills into loft apartments and health care facilities. Johnstown has none of those fallbacks - the last mill closed in 1992, and the people have fled. Johnstown had 63,000 residents in 1960, it has 18,000 today, and the decay is everywhere. I've taken photos as illustration - it's not as bad as East St. Louis (which has experienced a similar population exodus), but when 70% of your population departs, houses become worth basically nothing, and there is no path for recovery. The poverty rate is triple Pennsylvania's average, the population skews old, and the city manager notes "we have a couple hundred houses that are vacant because the owner died and there is no one to buy them" - that's a doom loop of tax revenue and real estate values.

We spent a lot of time driving around looking for "the good part of town" - we finally found an enclave up near The Incline (where we shot the "aerial" pictures of the city) - but geographically isolated, with an increasingly elderly population, Johnstown will die. Is this also force majeure? It's easy to understand why these people would respond to a populist message. Cambria County, where Johnstown is the county seat, voted 70% for Trump last year.

Oh, the cycling (I almost forgot!) - I enjoyed the trip via the "Path of the Flood" bike trail down to Johnstown from the dam. The Staple Bend tunnel, 900 feet long, hand-hewn by Irish laborers in the 1850s, was a treat to ride through. I sped into Johnstown at 20mph, the approximate speed of the flood wave, imagining the concept of the speed and the impact. I also appreciated the geographic isolation as I climbed 1500 feet out of Johnstown to the top of the Laurel Highlands.

I left with a sense of sadness. Johnstown's reason to exist has passed. No joy in that sentiment, just a statement of fact. I'm left with the same conclusion I felt about the Arkansas Delta towns - it would be better to incent relocation than prop up the past that will never return.