The Johnstown Flood

The destruction about to be unleashed on the way down the mountain was nothing that anyone could have been prepared for. Civil engineers investigating the event would later be convinced that the water rushing down the mountain that day “charged into the valley at a velocity and depth comparable to that of the Niagara River as it reaches Niagara Falls” (119). The hill on the opposite side of the dam was stripped of trees almost 50 feet up into the hillside, and the men who had rushed to the dam when they sensed trouble could only watch as the water sunk lower and lower “until there was nothing to see but hundreds of acres of dark ooze” (120) that had once been the bottom of the lake.

As this happened, H.M. Bennet, down at the South Fork telegraph office chatting with a woman named Emma Ehrenfield, looked out the window to see people sprinting over the hills. Almost immediately, they also saw the water coming fast “like a mountain” (122), and they all dashed out of the office as the water destroyed the mill and ripped the bridge off its foundation in the Little Conemaugh river. While South Fork was hit fast and hard, “remarkably little damage had been done” (124) to the town before the water was passed and gone.