Happy Saturday. Not long ago, we did a podcast on Andrew Carnegie, and one of the questions that we got from listeners afterward was why we had not discussed the Johnstown flood. Carnegie was a member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which owned the damn that failed in that flood, and the whole area had a number of other connections to Carnegie Steel. Carnegie contributed to relief efforts after the flood, and he funded the building of a new library for the town, but neither he nor any of the other members of the club ever expressed any responsibility for the disaster. So there's a whole episode about that flood in the archive from from Past host Sarah and Deblina, and since it came up in our listener mail recently, we thought we would share it again today. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuffworks dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblina Chokolate Boarding and depending on where you live, you've probably gotten used to the threat of a particular type of natural disaster. I remember where I grew up, it was always tornadoes that people were afraid of, and that came through the area a lot, and when I lived on the Gulf Coast, it was hurricanes, of course. And for the thirty thousand people who lived in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in eighteen eighty nine, what they had gotten used to dealing with was floods. Yeah. Located in a floodplain at the confluence of two rivers, Johnstown flooded really frequently, so it was pretty common to see water in the streets, and locals had gotten used to moving their valuables and themselves to the upper floors of their homes when the floodwater started to roll it. They had kind of a routine exactly with it. But on May thirty one, eighteen eighty nine, a flood of such magnitude hit the town that even those who were holed up in their homes upper levels weren't ready for it. It's been called one of the worst is susters in American history, and nobody in Johnstown really saw it coming. So that's partially because there was more to this natural disaster than just nature, and that's part of what we're going to take a look at today. First, though, we're gonna paint a little picture of Johnstown for you so you can understand why it flooded so frequently in the first place, and then just what kind of community it was at the time too. So nineteenth century Johnstown was a busy industrial town in southwestern Pennsylvania, and according to an article by Amy Lynn Brown in National Parks, entrepreneurs had not too long before turned it into a larger industrial sort of production area of steel and iron um, and not long before that it had just been this small rural community. So a real dramatic change for Johnstown, and it had a burgeoning working class community that lived there too. The town itself was kind of hempt in by the Little Conema and the Stony Creek rivers, which ran along the edges of Johnstown and then merged on the town's western end to form the Connuma River. These rivers flooded the town at least once every year, and there were a couple of reasons for that, a couple of possible I guess instigators for the flooding. Flooding causes right One was snow melting and draining from the nearby Allegheny Mountains into the rivers in the springtime, specifically, which would cause the rivers to overflow, and then of course at any time of year, heavy rain could also cause flooding flood the river. So those were the natural surroundings of the town. But there was also a man made body of water that was nearby. It was fourteen miles up the Little Connuma River, and it was called Lake Connuma, although I don't think of it as as some sort of natural lake. It was originally called the Western Reservoir, and it had originally been created to supply water for the Pennsylvania Canal that went between Johnstown and Pittsburgh, but the canal system became obsolete not long after the reservoir project was complete, so not having anything to do with this large body of water, the reservoir was sold and had a few different owners before it was finally sold to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club in eighteen seventy nine. The club made this former reservoir into a bit of a ritzy social affair almost it did, uh and it was a organization to which many prominent Pennsylvanians belonged, including big names like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. And members would go to this club to kind of escape the industrial environs of Pittsburgh and enjoy things like fishing, sailing, even musical performances, and it was the club that renamed the reservoir Lake Conema. Just an important note to make here, the dam that kept Lake Conuma contained. The South Fork Dam was essentially made of packed dirt and rocks, and it had not been kept up properly for a number of years by the time it came into the club's possession well, and most disturbingly, somebody had even taken out the damn's drainage pipes that at some point in order to sell them for scraps, so there wasn't any way to drain the reservoir in order to make repair. So even if you had wanted to repair the damn, you would not have been able to. According to the Johnstown Flood Museum, when the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club took over, it started maintaining the dam a little bit better, but they also made some changes to it that made it even less safe. For example, they added some screens across the spill way to keep the expensive game fish that they had stock the lake with from escaping, and this prevented the spill away from draining the lake's overflow. They also made the damn a couple feet lower so that two carriages could pass over it at the same time. So this is we've panted a picture of of what the situation was like uh in May of eight nine, and from a weather standpoint, that spring had been rather unique, according to an article by Emily Lorditch and weatherwise, a series of storms had led to record breaking rainfall that year, so we were getting the perfect storm here, as you can tell. On May thirty one, the residents of Johnstown were experiencing a particularly heavy storm, and Brown writes that rain was falling at a rate of an inch per hour and rivers were running six to seven ft above normal levels. By afternoon, the streets in town were already flooding, so people were going through their their normal routine. When there was a flood, head up to the upper floors, ride out the storm, you know, put some of your belongings upstairs. Again, just a very typical sort of scene for Johnstown. What they didn't know is that fourteen miles up at Lake Conoma, a scene was taking place that was entirely unprecedented. Depth of the water of the foy Acre Lake was sixty ft near the dam, and officials at the club had been watching that level continued to rise during the storm with great concern. Of course, the morning of May thirty one, they were so worried about the damn collapsing that they actually started to think about taking action. And I mean people in Johnstown, just another aside here, had sort of known that the dam failing and the dam breaking down was a possibility because of the condition of the dam, and some people even joked about it. And this kind of reminds me of when you do live in an area where a certain type of natural disaster sort of prevalent, Like I remember living on the coast and when hurricanes would come, there were always people who just sort of didn't really take it seriously. Yeah, exactly. There's always that contingent of people, I think. But in this case, when the people at the club saw what was happening, they did try to take a few steps, as I said, for to keep the dam from failing. They for example, added dirt to the top. They also dug a second spill way to relieve the pressure, and they removed the screens that kept the stocked fish from escaping. But it was too late. It was too late. At this point, nothing they did was able to help, and at about three pm that day, people at the club and in the nearby community of South Fork watched in shock as the damn quote just moved away, sending twenty million tons of water barreling down the valley. Of course, headed right towards Johnstown in just a matter of minutes, and according to Gene Allen's book Floods, the club wasn't completely They were trying to take efforts to to save the dam, but there was also a warning sent out. I mean, a couple of guys had ridden through town earlier shouting warnings that the dam was about to fail, but people didn't really listen. I mean, like you were just talking about there's kind of a an almost joke like maybe the dam will fail, but people didn't really think that was going to happen. Within an hour of the dam failing, though, that twenty million tons of water finally did reach Johnstown. It was traveling at speeds of anywhere from twenty to forty miles per hour, and by the time it reached the town it was said to have had as much force as Niagara Falls, which is just a stunning comparison to me. Well, and it created a tidal wave too, it did. It was a tidal wave of water that was forty ft high and carried all sorts of debris with it by the time it hit Johnstown, including industrial and farm debris, houses, barns, animals, even people both dead and alive. The townspeople were totally blindsided by this. Some people only heard a thunder like sound as the wave approached. Apparently it only took ten minutes basically to wash the entire town away. Yeah, and and really the entire town was washed away. Trains, entire homes just swept up in the waves. So of course people were swept up in it too. Some of course drowned right away in the flood of rushing water. Others were killed or injured by the debris that was in the water. A lot of people and this is maybe one of the more horrifying aspects of the flood. So a lot of people, about three hundred to four hundred ended up surviving initially but then getting swept away by the rushing water and getting trapped up against this large stone bridge that was owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. And this bridge was actually blocking a lot of the stuff that was rushing through the town, you know, box cars, barbed wire, big chunks of homes, dead animals, creating this this log jam. Essentially all the debris, though clogging the bridge eventually did catch fire and the people trapped against the bridge, of course, died at that point. Again, just one of the most horrifying aspects of this already horrifying story. Ultimately, though, about two thousand, two hundred nine people died in this disaster, And just to give you a sense of what those numbers mean for a town of Johnstown size, it's something like one out of every ten people in the town. Seven seventy of the victims were never identified. And the number that Sarah just put out about the number of people total who died that included nine entire families, six hundred homes were destroyed, and seventeen million dollars in property damage was done. So that was just to give you an idea of the toll that this disaster took. Some people, however, did survive by writing out the flood in their homes or in the upper stories of other buildings in town. Others took a crazy ride down the Connuma River and were later rescued somewhere downstream, which is just wild to me. I mean, I know, I just said it's crazy, and then I said it's wild, so I said that twice. But I have nothing to add to that. It's hard to imagine being actually carried alive barns and dead animals going along with you. But as you can imagine, either of these survival scenarios were pretty harrowing. And there are fortunately a lot of examples though, a lot of records from the flood, so we're able to see what it was like for people and how they managed to survive. And one story that gets retold a lot is the story of a six year old girl named Gertrude Quinn Slatterly, who was swept away by floodwaters while she was hanging onto this muddy mattress as a kind of raft, and as she recalled, she was terrified. She was calling out for someone to help her, and this man dove into the water to to save her. He made his way over to her onto the mattress, lifted her up, and she later wrote of the experience quote, I put both arms around his neck and held onto him like grim death. Together we went downstream and um Miraculously they eventually reached this white building where men were leaning out the window trying to nab people as they came by, rescuing people, and the rescuer through Gertrude through the air. Some people later said it was as much as fifteen to twenty feet through the air uh to to safety for the other guys to be able to catch her. Another woman, Anna fn Maxwell, was in her home with her seven children when the flood hit. She survived, but unfortunately her kids weren't so lucky. The Johnstown Flood Museum actually shares how she described the scene, and it's pretty sad. She said. Quote the water rose and floated us until our heads nearly touched the ceiling. It was dark, and the house was tossing every way. The air was stifling, and I could not tell just the moment the rest of the children had to give up and drown. What I suffered with the bodies of my seven children floating around me and the gloom can never be told. Yeah. So pretty powerful story and the Johnstown Flood Museum's website shares several survival stories like this um. Some are more uplifting than others of course. Um, in some cases too, we should say entire families did survive. But it seems like you would have had to have been very lucky, and all your family members would have had to have been quite lucky for that to be the case. One thing that is remarkable about this flood, though, the relief efforts began pretty much immediately, and people all over donated clothing and food, lumber, medical supplies, money. Doctors came to town to to help treat the injured. Within five days. Clara Barton and her newly established American Red Cross we're in town. Uh. It was the first peacetime disaster that the organization assisted in, and they really did a lot. They built warehouses for donated supplies to be stored, UM, hotels for for the homeless. Buildings that were still standing were repurposed into makeshift morgues to avoid the spread of disease, all all of that sort of stuff. Um. It seems kind of un believable, but all of these recovery efforts seemed to have paid off almost immediately. According to Brown's article, it only took a month for businesses to reopen and only five years for the cleanup effort to be completed. This wouldn't be the last time, however, that Johnstown would have to deal with floods, even though the South Fork Dam was already destroyed, so you would think of this big threat is taken away, so that's not an issue. But in nineteen thirty six, Johnstown was hit with fourteen feet of floodwaters caused by heavy rains combined with snow runoff. Twenty four people died in this case and three thousand buildings were damaged or destroyed. Then in July nine, seventy seven, there was another flood caused by a line of thunderstorms that stalled over the area and also the fact that several dams failed contributed to this. In this case, five people died and there was more than three hundred million dollars in property damage. And after this third flood, the town's economy didn't cover as well as it did the first couple of times. Well you can imagine though, even after that eighteen eighty nine flood, there was a lot of discussion about who was to blame, because, as we've discussed, there was clearly more going on than just the natural forces. You know, the dam and its maintenance and many people did blame the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club for not taking more steps to prevent the damn failure in the first place. Of suits were even filed against the club, but they never really went anywhere. And in discussing how the flood of eighteen eighty nine didn't have to happen, Brown points to general industrialization and population growth in the area really being to blame. I mean, we talked about that at the beginning of the show, how this had not too long before turned from a rural, agricultural area where some flooding wasn't terribly devastating at least, to life too of densely populated industrial area. She includes a couple of oats to that speak really well to this. One is from David McCullough, who is a former podcast interviewee and he wrote a book out. His first book, I think, was about the Johnstown flood. He said, quote, with the valley crowding up the way it was, the need for lumber and land was growing apace. As a result, more and more timber was being stripped off the mountains and near hills, and in Johnstown the river channels were being narrowed to make room for new buildings where the forests were destroyed. Spring thaws and summer thunderstorms would send torrents racing down the mountain sides, and each year the torrents grew worse as the water itself tore away at the soil and what little groundcover there was left. So this kind of helps explain how the industrialization of the area would make the flooding worse. Yeah, taking away the natural buffers that could have helped alleviate natural floods and then making everything worse too. Brown also quotes Megan O'Malley, who is the chief of interpretation at the Johnstown Flood nash A Memorial, and she says, quote, we call the flood a natural disaster, but it was a disaster that occurred from a combination of natural events and human manipulation of the environment. We see that's happened over and over in human history. We create preconditions for disaster, and then disaster occurs. And I know similar arguments are often made about more recent natural disasters. I mean, you see it pretty much every time there's a natural disaster, maybe with the exception of tornadoes, because I think everybody understands there's not a whole lot you can do about that, but earthquakes, hurricanes, floods. Every time you'll see a discussion that that's similar to that one. Um, I guess it's just the way of the world. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information. We are at History Podcasts at how stuff works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History. All over social media, that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.

Happy Saturday. Not long ago, we did a podcast on Andrew Carnegie, and one of the questions that we got from listeners afterward was why we had not discussed the Johnstown flood. Carnegie was a member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which owned the damn that failed in that flood, and the whole area had a number of other connections to Carnegie Steel. Carnegie contributed to relief efforts after the flood, and he funded the building of a new library for the town, but neither he nor any of the other members of the club ever expressed any responsibility for the disaster. So there's a whole episode about that flood in the archive from from Past host Sarah and Deblina, and since it came up in our listener mail recently, we thought we would share it again today. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuffworks dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblina Chokolate Boarding and depending on where you live, you've probably gotten used to the threat of a particular type of natural disaster. I remember where I grew up, it was always tornadoes that people were afraid of, and that came through the area a lot, and when I lived on the Gulf Coast, it was hurricanes, of course. And for the thirty thousand people who lived in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in eighteen eighty nine, what they had gotten used to dealing with was floods. Yeah. Located in a floodplain at the confluence of two rivers, Johnstown flooded really frequently, so it was pretty common to see water in the streets, and locals had gotten used to moving their valuables and themselves to the upper floors of their homes when the floodwater started to roll it. They had kind of a routine exactly with it. But on May thirty one, eighteen eighty nine, a flood of such magnitude hit the town that even those who were holed up in their homes upper levels weren't ready for it. It's been called one of the worst is susters in American history, and nobody in Johnstown really saw it coming. So that's partially because there was more to this natural disaster than just nature, and that's part of what we're going to take a look at today. First, though, we're gonna paint a little picture of Johnstown for you so you can understand why it flooded so frequently in the first place, and then just what kind of community it was at the time too. So nineteenth century Johnstown was a busy industrial town in southwestern Pennsylvania, and according to an article by Amy Lynn Brown in National Parks, entrepreneurs had not too long before turned it into a larger industrial sort of production area of steel and iron um, and not long before that it had just been this small rural community. So a real dramatic change for Johnstown, and it had a burgeoning working class community that lived there too. The town itself was kind of hempt in by the Little Conema and the Stony Creek rivers, which ran along the edges of Johnstown and then merged on the town's western end to form the Connuma River. These rivers flooded the town at least once every year, and there were a couple of reasons for that, a couple of possible I guess instigators for the flooding. Flooding causes right One was snow melting and draining from the nearby Allegheny Mountains into the rivers in the springtime, specifically, which would cause the rivers to overflow, and then of course at any time of year, heavy rain could also cause flooding flood the river. So those were the natural surroundings of the town. But there was also a man made body of water that was nearby. It was fourteen miles up the Little Connuma River, and it was called Lake Connuma, although I don't think of it as as some sort of natural lake. It was originally called the Western Reservoir, and it had originally been created to supply water for the Pennsylvania Canal that went between Johnstown and Pittsburgh, but the canal system became obsolete not long after the reservoir project was complete, so not having anything to do with this large body of water, the reservoir was sold and had a few different owners before it was finally sold to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club in eighteen seventy nine. The club made this former reservoir into a bit of a ritzy social affair almost it did, uh and it was a organization to which many prominent Pennsylvanians belonged, including big names like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. And members would go to this club to kind of escape the industrial environs of Pittsburgh and enjoy things like fishing, sailing, even musical performances, and it was the club that renamed the reservoir Lake Conema. Just an important note to make here, the dam that kept Lake Conuma contained. The South Fork Dam was essentially made of packed dirt and rocks, and it had not been kept up properly for a number of years by the time it came into the club's possession well, and most disturbingly, somebody had even taken out the damn's drainage pipes that at some point in order to sell them for scraps, so there wasn't any way to drain the reservoir in order to make repair. So even if you had wanted to repair the damn, you would not have been able to. According to the Johnstown Flood Museum, when the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club took over, it started maintaining the dam a little bit better, but they also made some changes to it that made it even less safe. For example, they added some screens across the spill way to keep the expensive game fish that they had stock the lake with from escaping, and this prevented the spill away from draining the lake's overflow. They also made the damn a couple feet lower so that two carriages could pass over it at the same time. So this is we've panted a picture of of what the situation was like uh in May of eight nine, and from a weather standpoint, that spring had been rather unique, according to an article by Emily Lorditch and weatherwise, a series of storms had led to record breaking rainfall that year, so we were getting the perfect storm here, as you can tell. On May thirty one, the residents of Johnstown were experiencing a particularly heavy storm, and Brown writes that rain was falling at a rate of an inch per hour and rivers were running six to seven ft above normal levels. By afternoon, the streets in town were already flooding, so people were going through their their normal routine. When there was a flood, head up to the upper floors, ride out the storm, you know, put some of your belongings upstairs. Again, just a very typical sort of scene for Johnstown. What they didn't know is that fourteen miles up at Lake Conoma, a scene was taking place that was entirely unprecedented. Depth of the water of the foy Acre Lake was sixty ft near the dam, and officials at the club had been watching that level continued to rise during the storm with great concern. Of course, the morning of May thirty one, they were so worried about the damn collapsing that they actually started to think about taking action. And I mean people in Johnstown, just another aside here, had sort of known that the dam failing and the dam breaking down was a possibility because of the condition of the dam, and some people even joked about it. And this kind of reminds me of when you do live in an area where a certain type of natural disaster sort of prevalent, Like I remember living on the coast and when hurricanes would come, there were always people who just sort of didn't really take it seriously. Yeah, exactly. There's always that contingent of people, I think. But in this case, when the people at the club saw what was happening, they did try to take a few steps, as I said, for to keep the dam from failing. They for example, added dirt to the top. They also dug a second spill way to relieve the pressure, and they removed the screens that kept the stocked fish from escaping. But it was too late. It was too late. At this point, nothing they did was able to help, and at about three pm that day, people at the club and in the nearby community of South Fork watched in shock as the damn quote just moved away, sending twenty million tons of water barreling down the valley. Of course, headed right towards Johnstown in just a matter of minutes, and according to Gene Allen's book Floods, the club wasn't completely They were trying to take efforts to to save the dam, but there was also a warning sent out. I mean, a couple of guys had ridden through town earlier shouting warnings that the dam was about to fail, but people didn't really listen. I mean, like you were just talking about there's kind of a an almost joke like maybe the dam will fail, but people didn't really think that was going to happen. Within an hour of the dam failing, though, that twenty million tons of water finally did reach Johnstown. It was traveling at speeds of anywhere from twenty to forty miles per hour, and by the time it reached the town it was said to have had as much force as Niagara Falls, which is just a stunning comparison to me. Well, and it created a tidal wave too, it did. It was a tidal wave of water that was forty ft high and carried all sorts of debris with it by the time it hit Johnstown, including industrial and farm debris, houses, barns, animals, even people both dead and alive. The townspeople were totally blindsided by this. Some people only heard a thunder like sound as the wave approached. Apparently it only took ten minutes basically to wash the entire town away. Yeah, and and really the entire town was washed away. Trains, entire homes just swept up in the waves. So of course people were swept up in it too. Some of course drowned right away in the flood of rushing water. Others were killed or injured by the debris that was in the water. A lot of people and this is maybe one of the more horrifying aspects of the flood. So a lot of people, about three hundred to four hundred ended up surviving initially but then getting swept away by the rushing water and getting trapped up against this large stone bridge that was owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. And this bridge was actually blocking a lot of the stuff that was rushing through the town, you know, box cars, barbed wire, big chunks of homes, dead animals, creating this this log jam. Essentially all the debris, though clogging the bridge eventually did catch fire and the people trapped against the bridge, of course, died at that point. Again, just one of the most horrifying aspects of this already horrifying story. Ultimately, though, about two thousand, two hundred nine people died in this disaster, And just to give you a sense of what those numbers mean for a town of Johnstown size, it's something like one out of every ten people in the town. Seven seventy of the victims were never identified. And the number that Sarah just put out about the number of people total who died that included nine entire families, six hundred homes were destroyed, and seventeen million dollars in property damage was done. So that was just to give you an idea of the toll that this disaster took. Some people, however, did survive by writing out the flood in their homes or in the upper stories of other buildings in town. Others took a crazy ride down the Connuma River and were later rescued somewhere downstream, which is just wild to me. I mean, I know, I just said it's crazy, and then I said it's wild, so I said that twice. But I have nothing to add to that. It's hard to imagine being actually carried alive barns and dead animals going along with you. But as you can imagine, either of these survival scenarios were pretty harrowing. And there are fortunately a lot of examples though, a lot of records from the flood, so we're able to see what it was like for people and how they managed to survive. And one story that gets retold a lot is the story of a six year old girl named Gertrude Quinn Slatterly, who was swept away by floodwaters while she was hanging onto this muddy mattress as a kind of raft, and as she recalled, she was terrified. She was calling out for someone to help her, and this man dove into the water to to save her. He made his way over to her onto the mattress, lifted her up, and she later wrote of the experience quote, I put both arms around his neck and held onto him like grim death. Together we went downstream and um Miraculously they eventually reached this white building where men were leaning out the window trying to nab people as they came by, rescuing people, and the rescuer through Gertrude through the air. Some people later said it was as much as fifteen to twenty feet through the air uh to to safety for the other guys to be able to catch her. Another woman, Anna fn Maxwell, was in her home with her seven children when the flood hit. She survived, but unfortunately her kids weren't so lucky. The Johnstown Flood Museum actually shares how she described the scene, and it's pretty sad. She said. Quote the water rose and floated us until our heads nearly touched the ceiling. It was dark, and the house was tossing every way. The air was stifling, and I could not tell just the moment the rest of the children had to give up and drown. What I suffered with the bodies of my seven children floating around me and the gloom can never be told. Yeah. So pretty powerful story and the Johnstown Flood Museum's website shares several survival stories like this um. Some are more uplifting than others of course. Um, in some cases too, we should say entire families did survive. But it seems like you would have had to have been very lucky, and all your family members would have had to have been quite lucky for that to be the case. One thing that is remarkable about this flood, though, the relief efforts began pretty much immediately, and people all over donated clothing and food, lumber, medical supplies, money. Doctors came to town to to help treat the injured. Within five days. Clara Barton and her newly established American Red Cross we're in town. Uh. It was the first peacetime disaster that the organization assisted in, and they really did a lot. They built warehouses for donated supplies to be stored, UM, hotels for for the homeless. Buildings that were still standing were repurposed into makeshift morgues to avoid the spread of disease, all all of that sort of stuff. Um. It seems kind of un believable, but all of these recovery efforts seemed to have paid off almost immediately. According to Brown's article, it only took a month for businesses to reopen and only five years for the cleanup effort to be completed. This wouldn't be the last time, however, that Johnstown would have to deal with floods, even though the South Fork Dam was already destroyed, so you would think of this big threat is taken away, so that's not an issue. But in nineteen thirty six, Johnstown was hit with fourteen feet of floodwaters caused by heavy rains combined with snow runoff. Twenty four people died in this case and three thousand buildings were damaged or destroyed. Then in July nine, seventy seven, there was another flood caused by a line of thunderstorms that stalled over the area and also the fact that several dams failed contributed to this. In this case, five people died and there was more than three hundred million dollars in property damage. And after this third flood, the town's economy didn't cover as well as it did the first couple of times. Well you can imagine though, even after that eighteen eighty nine flood, there was a lot of discussion about who was to blame, because, as we've discussed, there was clearly more going on than just the natural forces. You know, the dam and its maintenance and many people did blame the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club for not taking more steps to prevent the damn failure in the first place. Of suits were even filed against the club, but they never really went anywhere. And in discussing how the flood of eighteen eighty nine didn't have to happen, Brown points to general industrialization and population growth in the area really being to blame. I mean, we talked about that at the beginning of the show, how this had not too long before turned from a rural, agricultural area where some flooding wasn't terribly devastating at least, to life too of densely populated industrial area. She includes a couple of oats to that speak really well to this. One is from David McCullough, who is a former podcast interviewee and he wrote a book out. His first book, I think, was about the Johnstown flood. He said, quote, with the valley crowding up the way it was, the need for lumber and land was growing apace. As a result, more and more timber was being stripped off the mountains and near hills, and in Johnstown the river channels were being narrowed to make room for new buildings where the forests were destroyed. Spring thaws and summer thunderstorms would send torrents racing down the mountain sides, and each year the torrents grew worse as the water itself tore away at the soil and what little groundcover there was left. So this kind of helps explain how the industrialization of the area would make the flooding worse. Yeah, taking away the natural buffers that could have helped alleviate natural floods and then making everything worse too. Brown also quotes Megan O'Malley, who is the chief of interpretation at the Johnstown Flood nash A Memorial, and she says, quote, we call the flood a natural disaster, but it was a disaster that occurred from a combination of natural events and human manipulation of the environment. We see that's happened over and over in human history. We create preconditions for disaster, and then disaster occurs. And I know similar arguments are often made about more recent natural disasters. I mean, you see it pretty much every time there's a natural disaster, maybe with the exception of tornadoes, because I think everybody understands there's not a whole lot you can do about that, but earthquakes, hurricanes, floods. Every time you'll see a discussion that that's similar to that one. Um, I guess it's just the way of the world. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information. We are at History Podcasts at how stuff works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History. All over social media, that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.