American Red Cross
NGO | Active
1881 CE to 2215 CE
The American Red Cross (ARC), also known as The American National Red Cross, is a humanitarian organization that provides emergency assistance, disaster relief, and disaster preparedness education in the United States.
It is the designated US affiliate of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the United States movement to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.
The organization offers services and development programs.
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The South Fork Dam collapses in western Pennsylvania, killing more than twenty-two hundred people in and around Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on May 31, 1889.
Floods have been almost a yearly event in the valley during the 1880s.
On the afternoon of May 30, 1889, following a quiet Memorial Day ceremony and a parade, it had begun raining in the valley.
The next day water fills the streets, and rumors begin that a dam holding an artificial lake in the mountains to the northeast might give way.
It does, and an estimated twenty million tons of water begin spilling into the winding gorge that leads to Johnstown some fourteen miles (twenty-three kilometer) away.
The destruction in Johnstown occurs in only about ten minutes.
What had been a thriving steel town with homes, churches, saloons, a library, a railroad station, electric street lights, a roller rink, and two opera houses is buried under mud and debris.
Out of a population of approximately thirty thousand at the time, at least two thousand two hundred and nine people are known to have perished in the disaster.
An infamous site of a major fire during the flood is the old stone Pennsylvania Railroad bridge located where the Stonycreek and Little Conemaugh rivers join to form the Conemaugh River.
The bridge still stands today.
The Johnstown flood of 1889 establishes the American Red Cross as the pre-eminent emergency relief organization in the United States.
Founder Clara Barton, now sixty-seven, comes to Johnstown with fifty doctors and nurses and sets up tent hospitals as well as temporary "hotels" for the homeless, and will stayon for five months to coordinate relief efforts.