On This Day: Role of uber-wealthy fishing club in Johnstown flood disaster explained in 2016 - May 31, 1889
(edited from Wikipedia)
"
Johnstown Flood
The Johnstown Flood, sometimes referred to locally as Great Flood of 1889, occurred on Friday, May 31, 1889, after the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam, located on the south fork of the Little Conemaugh River, 14 miles upstream of the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, United States. The dam ruptured after several days of extremely heavy rainfall, releasing 14.55 million cubic meters of water. With a volumetric flow rate that temporarily equaled the average flow rate of the Mississippi River, the flood killed 2,208 people and accounted for US$17,000,000 (equivalent to about $580,000,000 in 2023) in damage.
The American Red Cross, led by Clara Barton and with fifty volunteers, undertook a major disaster relief effort. Support for victims came from all over the U.S. and eighteen foreign countries. After the flood, survivors suffered a series of legal defeats in their attempts to recover damages from the dam's owners. This led to American law changing from a fault-based regime to one of strict liability.
[Private interests buy dam and lake]
High above the city, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania built the South Fork Dam between 1838 and 1853 as part of a cross-state canal system, the Main Line of Public Works. Johnstown was the eastern terminus of the Western Division Canal, supplied with water by Lake Conemaugh, the reservoir behind the dam. As railroads superseded canal barge transport, the Commonwealth abandoned the canal and sold it to the Pennsylvania Railroad. The dam and lake were part of the purchase, and the railroad sold them to private interests.
[Dam lowered, relief pipes and valves not replaced]
Henry Clay Frick led a group of Pittsburgh speculators, including Benjamin Ruff, to purchase the abandoned reservoir, modify it, and convert it into a private resort lake for their wealthy associates. Many were connected through business and social links to Carnegie Steel. Development included lowering the dam to make its top wide enough to hold a road and putting a fish screen in the spillway. Workers lowered the dam, which had been 72 feet high, by 3 feet. These alterations are thought to have increased the vulnerability of the dam. Moreover, a system of relief pipes and valves, a feature of the original dam which had previously been sold off for scrap, was not replaced, so the club had no way of lowering the water level in the lake in case of an emergency.
[Fishing and hunting club for industrialists]
The Pittsburgh speculators built cottages and a clubhouse to create the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, an exclusive and private mountain retreat. Membership grew to include more than fifty wealthy steel, coal, and railroad industrialists. Lake Conemaugh at the club's site was 450 feet in elevation above Johnstown. The lake was about 2 miles long, about 1 mile wide, and 60 feet deep near the dam. The dam was 72 feet high and 931 feet long.
Events of the flood
On May 28, 1889, a low-pressure area formed over Nebraska and Kansas. By the time this weather pattern reached western Pennsylvania two days later, it had developed into what would be termed the heaviest rainfall event that had ever been recorded in that part of the U.S. The United States Army Signal Corps estimated that 6 to 10 inches of rain fell in 24 hours over the region.
Between 2:50 and 2:55 pm [on May 31] the South Fork Dam breached. Lidar analysis of the Lake Conemaugh basin reveals that it contained 3.843 billion gallons of water at the moment the dam collapsed.
Fifty-seven minutes after the dam collapsed, the flood reached Johnstown. Residents were caught by surprise as the wall of water and debris bore down, traveling at speeds of 40 miles per hour and reaching a height of 60 feet in places.
The total death toll from the flood was calculated originally as 2,209 people, making the disaster the largest loss of civilian life in the U.S. at the time.
Investigation and Report
On June 5, 1889, five days after the flood, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) appointed a committee of four prominent engineers to investigate the cause of the disaster. The committee was led by the esteemed James B. Francis, a hydraulic engineer best known for his work related to canals, flood control, turbine design, dam construction, and hydraulic calculations. Francis was a founding member of the ASCE and served as its president from November 1880 to January 1882. The committee visited the site of the South Fork Dam, reviewed the original engineering design of the dam and modifications made during repairs, interviewed eyewitnesses, commissioned a topographic survey of the dam remnants, and performed hydrologic calculations.
In its final report, the ASCE committee concluded the dam would have failed even if it had been maintained within the original design specifications, i.e., with a higher embankment crest and with five large discharge pipes at the dam's base.
This claim has since been challenged.
[Fatal lowering of dam]
A hydraulic analysis published in 2016 confirmed that the changes made to the dam by the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club severely reduced its ability to withstand major storms. Lowering the dam by as much as 3 feet and failing to replace the discharge pipes at its base cut the dam's safe discharge capacity in half. This fatal lowering of the dam greatly reduced the capacity of the main spillway and virtually eliminated the action of an emergency spillway on the western abutment.
Walter Frank first documented the presence of that emergency spillway in a 1988 ASCE publication. Its existence is supported by topographic data from 1889 which shows the western abutment to be about one foot lower than the crest of the dam remnants, even after the dam had previously been lowered as much as three feet by the South Fork Club. Adding the width of the emergency spillway to that of the main spillway yielded the total width of spillway capacity that had been specified in the 1847 design of William Morris, a state engineer.
Legal
In the years following the disaster, some survivors blamed the members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club for their modifications to the dam. They were accused of failing to maintain the dam properly, so that it was unable to contain the additional water of the unusually heavy rainfall. The club was successfully defended in court by the firm of Knox and Reed (later Reed Smith LLP), whose partners Philander Knox and James Hay Reed were both club members. Knox and Reed successfully argued that the dam's failure was a natural disaster which was an Act of God, and no legal compensation was paid to the survivors of the flood. The club was never held legally responsible for the disaster. The perceived injustice aided the acceptance, in later cases, of "strict, joint, and several liability," so that even a "non-negligent defendant could be held liable for damage caused by the unnatural use of land."
Individual members of the South Fork Club, millionaires in their day, contributed to the recovery in Johnstown. Along with about half of the club members, co-founder Henry Clay Frick donated thousands of dollars to the relief effort. After the flood, Andrew Carnegie built the town a new library.
Popular feeling ran high, as is reflected in Isaac G. Reed's poem:
Many thousand human lives-
Butchered husbands, slaughtered wives
Mangled daughters, bleeding sons,
Hosts of martyred little ones,
(Worse than Herod's awful crime)
Sent to heaven before their time;
Lovers burnt and sweethearts drowned,
Darlings lost but never found!
All the horrors that hell could wish,
Such was the price that was paid for fish!
Effect on the development of American law
Survivors of the flood were unable to recover damages in court because of the South Fork Club's ample resources. First, the wealthy club owners had designed the club's financial structure to keep their personal assets separated from it and, secondly, it was difficult for any suit to prove that any particular owner had behaved negligently. Though the former reason was probably more central to the failure of survivors' suits against the club, the latter received coverage and extensive criticism in the national press.
As a result of this criticism, in the 1890s, state courts around the country adopted Rylands v. Fletcher, a British common law precedent which had formerly been largely ignored in the United States. State courts' adoption of Rylands, which held that a non-negligent defendant could be held liable for damage caused by the unnatural use of land, foreshadowed the legal system's 20th-century acceptance of strict liability.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood
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Deep State Witch
(11,140 posts)Was apparently so remorseful that he started giving away tons of money, and established the free library system we know today. Henry Clay Frick and the others? Not so much.