McCullough, who excels at these history snippets (See, this and his 1776 for proof. The event is fading into memory as time passes and other tragedies occur. These days your average joe would be hard pressed to give correct details on the Johnstown Flood. It posits hypotheticals, wondering aloud all the what-ifs the public has been asking. The book on the whole reads like a newspaper feature article or Op-Ed piece that comes out a few weeks after a contentious event where more questions than answers arise after the dust settles. This horror probably wouldn't have happened if not for a 'let them eat cake' attitude by an elite few who wanted to maintain their Summer-fun pleasure palaces on a dammed lake perched precariously above a small town in a narrow valley below. In The Johnstown Flood, David McCullough gives you all as well as the heart and soul of this heinous catastrophe.īehind the numbers and stats, and even the human tragedy, there is an evil lurking here. With a volumetric flow rate that temporarily equalled that of the Mississippi River, the flood killed 2,209 people and caused US$17 million of damage (the equivalent of about $425 million in 2012 dollars).' - Wikipedia. gallons 18.2 million cubic meters 18.2 billion litres) from the reservoir known as Lake Conemaugh. The dam's failure unleashed a torrent of 20 million tons of water (4.8 billion U.S. It was the result of the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam situated on the Little Conemaugh River 14 miles (23 km) upstream of the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, USA, made worse by several days of extremely heavy rainfall. 'The Johnstown Flood (or Great Flood of 1889 as it became known locally) occurred on May 31, 1889. It also offers a powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the danger of assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they are necessarily behaving responsibly. Graced by David McCullough's remarkable gift for writing richly textured, sympathetic social history, The Johnstown Flood is an absorbing, classic portrait of life in nineteenth-century America, of overweening confidence, of energy, and of tragedy.

It was a tragedy that became a national scandal.

Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain, smashing through Johnstown, and killing more than 2,000 people.

Despite repeated warnings of possible danger, nothing was done about the dam. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity.

The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough