The version shown on American Experience is an expanded version of the original. It's not narrated by Richard Dreyfus.
This is an expansion of an award-winning documentary made for the Flood Museum at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a small town devastated when a dam above the community failed and a sixty-foot wall of water and debris demolished Johnstown. The narrator, David McCoullough grew up in the area and heard stories of the disaster when he was a child. And so did my immigrant grandmother, who occasionally brought the subject up, although as a child I had no idea of what she was talking about.
The disaster was not a force majeur, like a tornado. The cause of the failure was the neglect of the dam itself, which had created a lake for local sportsmen, The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. Nobody seemed to care much about public safety then and we seem at the moment sometimes to be edging our way into that same Lotus Eater's paradise.
By 1889 Johnstown was a smoky industrial city of 30,000 people, mostly recent Welsh and German immigrants. The employed worked ten and twelve hour days, six days a week and sometimes seven, at the Cambria Steel Plant, producing rails, plowshares, and barbed wire. It was crowded, smoky, and poor. That was the norm at the time, and people were glad to have jobs. And things in Johnstown were improving: seventy-two telephones, electricity, a hospital, a newspaper, an opera house.
Everyday life was different at the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, fourteen miles up the river, whose members include people with names like Frick, Mellon, and Carnegie. The three-story, fifty-room mansions were their "cottages," used as retreats from the streets of Pittsburgh on weekends and summers, only two hours away from the city by rail. On summer afternoons there might be several dozen sails on the lake. Servants were hired from the town five hundred feet below and fourteen miles away. The dam was part of the club's property. It had passed through the hands of several owners who had done nothing to maintain it and who had, in fact, removed some discharge pipes and sold them for scrap, meaning the lake could never be drained.. Subsequently, the club itself had shave three feet from the top of the dam to allow the passage of horse and carriage. There were spillways at both sides of the dam, so that if the water should rise high enough, it wouldn't put too much pressure on the dam itself, but the spillways had been neglected and were clogged with boulders and fallen timber. Lovers considered it a romantic place to meet. For the most part, no one in the Club thought about the dam.
In Johnstown, the owner of the largest steel mill in town, the Cambria Iron Works, was concerned and sent some of his team to inspect the dam. The team's geologist, Fulton, returned thinking that "the dam was an accident waiting to happen." The Iron Works sent a letter to the Club proposing repairs to the dam and offering to share the expenses. The Club's manager dismissed the suggestion as mistaken and coming from "you and your people." On May 31st of 1889, a torrent of rain fell. Johnstown's streets became rivers, sweeping away cows. Streams appeared where no streams had been before. Eight inches of rain fell. Nobody had seen anything like it. And the lake was rising two inches each hour, despite efforts of the club's superintendent to raise the dam's height and clear its spillways of debris. At three in the afternoon the dam broke. It caused no damage to South Fork, which was on the side of a hill. It took ten minutes to sweep away the center of Johnstown. Two thousand, two hundred and twenty two men, women, and children were dead. One third of the bodies had been battered beyond recognition. What had destroyed the town was not just a wall of water but a huge wave mixed with bits and pieces of iron, wood, barbed ware, and other debris it had picked up in its fourteen miles journey.
Some residents left but most remained to rebuild the town. Indeed there was help sent from around the nation. Seven thousand pairs of shoes, for instance. Clara Barton stayed for five months, building a Red Cross hospital and doing other public services. The South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club was sued but no damages were ever awarded.
This program is a pretty good summary. It's in black and white and skillfully blends period photographs with black and white reenactments. For those more interested in the details there are several popular books available.
This is an expansion of an award-winning documentary made for the Flood Museum at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a small town devastated when a dam above the community failed and a sixty-foot wall of water and debris demolished Johnstown. The narrator, David McCoullough grew up in the area and heard stories of the disaster when he was a child. And so did my immigrant grandmother, who occasionally brought the subject up, although as a child I had no idea of what she was talking about.
The disaster was not a force majeur, like a tornado. The cause of the failure was the neglect of the dam itself, which had created a lake for local sportsmen, The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. Nobody seemed to care much about public safety then and we seem at the moment sometimes to be edging our way into that same Lotus Eater's paradise.
By 1889 Johnstown was a smoky industrial city of 30,000 people, mostly recent Welsh and German immigrants. The employed worked ten and twelve hour days, six days a week and sometimes seven, at the Cambria Steel Plant, producing rails, plowshares, and barbed wire. It was crowded, smoky, and poor. That was the norm at the time, and people were glad to have jobs. And things in Johnstown were improving: seventy-two telephones, electricity, a hospital, a newspaper, an opera house.
Everyday life was different at the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, fourteen miles up the river, whose members include people with names like Frick, Mellon, and Carnegie. The three-story, fifty-room mansions were their "cottages," used as retreats from the streets of Pittsburgh on weekends and summers, only two hours away from the city by rail. On summer afternoons there might be several dozen sails on the lake. Servants were hired from the town five hundred feet below and fourteen miles away. The dam was part of the club's property. It had passed through the hands of several owners who had done nothing to maintain it and who had, in fact, removed some discharge pipes and sold them for scrap, meaning the lake could never be drained.. Subsequently, the club itself had shave three feet from the top of the dam to allow the passage of horse and carriage. There were spillways at both sides of the dam, so that if the water should rise high enough, it wouldn't put too much pressure on the dam itself, but the spillways had been neglected and were clogged with boulders and fallen timber. Lovers considered it a romantic place to meet. For the most part, no one in the Club thought about the dam.
In Johnstown, the owner of the largest steel mill in town, the Cambria Iron Works, was concerned and sent some of his team to inspect the dam. The team's geologist, Fulton, returned thinking that "the dam was an accident waiting to happen." The Iron Works sent a letter to the Club proposing repairs to the dam and offering to share the expenses. The Club's manager dismissed the suggestion as mistaken and coming from "you and your people." On May 31st of 1889, a torrent of rain fell. Johnstown's streets became rivers, sweeping away cows. Streams appeared where no streams had been before. Eight inches of rain fell. Nobody had seen anything like it. And the lake was rising two inches each hour, despite efforts of the club's superintendent to raise the dam's height and clear its spillways of debris. At three in the afternoon the dam broke. It caused no damage to South Fork, which was on the side of a hill. It took ten minutes to sweep away the center of Johnstown. Two thousand, two hundred and twenty two men, women, and children were dead. One third of the bodies had been battered beyond recognition. What had destroyed the town was not just a wall of water but a huge wave mixed with bits and pieces of iron, wood, barbed ware, and other debris it had picked up in its fourteen miles journey.
Some residents left but most remained to rebuild the town. Indeed there was help sent from around the nation. Seven thousand pairs of shoes, for instance. Clara Barton stayed for five months, building a Red Cross hospital and doing other public services. The South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club was sued but no damages were ever awarded.
This program is a pretty good summary. It's in black and white and skillfully blends period photographs with black and white reenactments. For those more interested in the details there are several popular books available.
