Johnstown Flood
1889 CE
The Johnstown Flood (locally, the Great Flood of 1889) occurs on May 31, 1889, after the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam, located on the south fork of the Little Conemaugh River, fourteen miles (twenty-three kilometers) upstream of the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
The dam breaks after several days of extremely heavy rainfall, releasing 14.55 million cubic meters of water.
With a volumetric flow rate that temporarily equals the average flow rate of the Mississippi River, the flood kills more than twenty-two hundred people and accounts for seventeen million dollars of damage (about four hundred and eighty-four million in 2019 dollars).
The American Red Cross, led by Clara Barton and with fifty volunteers, undertakes a major disaster relief effort.
Support for victims comes from all over the United States and eighteen foreign countries.
After the flood, survivors suffers a series of legal defeats in their attempts to recover damages from the dam's owners.
Public indignation at this failure prompts the development in American law changing a fault-based regime to one of strict liability.
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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.