PA Johnstown Flood National Memorial: A Strict Liability Hike and Bike

My questions of legal liability concerning manmade environmental hazards began back at Canoe Creek State Park as my dog and I walked trails that led to and around ruins of limestone quarries, mines, and pits. Though park signs and good hiking etiquette require people stay on trails, I wondered what if someone was injured during an off-trail experience?  A fall into a mine shaft or a tumble off a vertical quarry pit wall? Who, if anyone, bears responsibility for a landscape so altered that it could cause harm?

The next day I took a hike and bike ride at the NPS Johnstown Flood Memorial at the site of the South Fork Dam which failed on May 31, 1889. I had this question in mind as I approached a park ranger at the Visitor Center about where I might learn more about how this manmade "natural" disaster caused a firestorm of legal debate around questions of liability. Before she could help me, her manager emerged from the office and informed a small group of visitors and staff that she had just learned of the passing of historian David McCullough whose first book Johnstown Flood (1968) lit my interest in environmental history while I still worked for the park service. The best-selling book also launched an intense national interest in the Johnstown flood, flood histories, and industrial liability. With the stunning success of the book, he helped raise funds for the Johnstown Flood Museum and the Johnstown Area Historical Association (JAHA). He was the driver behind much-needed renovations to the South Fork dam site under NPS management. A Pittsburgh native, McCullough helped create the culture and craft of story-telling which the current visitor center does with such excellence. The small group in the visitor center stood quietly as we digested the news.  

The valley that was once a lake.

After the flood obliterated the Conemaugh valley and destroyed Johnstown, the South Fork Fishing Club whose officers and owners were some of America's wealthiest industrialists, was able to deflect lawsuits by claiming the dam failure was an "Act of God," in essence finding legal fault with nature. It also helped that the rich club members inserted favored lawyers, specially selected "experts," and industry-friendly judges into the legal proceedings.  Public indignation boiled over as one lawsuit after another was dismissed, laying blame in natural causes.  Public pressure was so great that popular magazines, newspapers, and other public media engaged a new breed of investigative journalist called muckrakers who wrote exhaustively on this tragedy as well as two additional dam failures that occurred in the years following the 1889 flood.  As national pressure mounted, state and federal courts, unable to quell public outcry against environmental abuses of exploitative industries, began to consider the English Law regarding negligence and nuisance as American ideas of strict liability in cases of environmental disaster, human injury, and property loss caused by company negligence. 

Remains of the dam's spillway, a testament to greed.

McCullough's book tells a beautifully detailed and sympathetic story of the flood and its aftermath so I won't repeat it here in hopes you will read it (or read it again), but the author, after years of research and writing summed up the singular event as "...not an act of God or nature. It was brought about by human failure, shortsightedness, selfishness."  While the fallout of the Johnstown Flood legal actions instigated consideration of strict liability in state courts around the country, legislation to ensure dam safety took much longer. In fact, two more fatal Pennsylvania dam failures, the 1911 Austin Dam collapse and the 1977 Laurel Run Dam breech and collapse (which again flooded Johnstown), finally spurred Pennsylvania lawmakers into action enacting strict building code regulations for dam construction, maintenance, repair, and removal. It only took 90 years at a cost thousands of lives.

A surviving part of the Clubhouse under NPS care.

I hiked and biked around the South Fork Dam site. I explored what was left of the spillway where iron grates had been installed by the South Fork Fishing Club to prevent their 1,000 cherished (and expensive) black bass from escaping the lake. The grates would quickly become clogged as flood waters overtopped the dam on Friday night, May 31, adding tons of pressure to the weakened center. I biked down from the NPS site into the little town of St. Michaels, the town that grew up on the edge of the lake after the flood. Here I found a good lunch and visited a few surviving club member cottages (really big Victorian homes) and the restored remains of the clubhouse/guesthouse.  I spoke with a NPS carpenter who was working on the clubhouse porch. "This place still represents something difficult for the locals to wrap their heads around, even a hundred plus years later - the greed and indifference of rich people." 

I biked up to the NPS Picnic Area and walked out on the South Fork Trail and looked back at the Visitor Center. In the years before the flood, the fishing club had removed the large outflow pipes at the base of the dam, effectively sealing off any possibility of releasing water to counter rising lake levels during high water events. With no thought of repairing and shoring up an existing slump from a past breech and with visible leaks erupted in the steep downstream wall, club owners assured worried citizens downstream that the dam posed no threat. In 1889, when the heaviest rains ever witnessed by residents in the small downriver towns of South Fork and Mineral Point continued to pound the valley, alarm was raised in Johnstown, already flooded under ten feet of water. A telegraph operator sent a dire message to the railyard in East Conemaugh: "South Fork Dam is liable to break: Notify the People of Johnstown to prepare for the worst." 

The breech.

A railroad line now runs through the breech in the South Fork Dam. Interstate 219 crosses the narrow valley just below what is still visible of the old lake bed and dam ruins. I rode my bike back to the Visitor Center and checked my speed averaging about 15 mph. It took me about 30 minutes to reach my truck at the top of the hill. Thirty minutes after the dam collapsed on May 31, 1889, a roaring wall of logs, metal, lumber, rock, and roiling brown flood water had already obliterated South Fork and Mineral Point and was bearing down on East Conemaugh at 40mph. By the time I finished putting away my helmet and backpack and locked my bike on its rack, I glanced at my phone. Fifty-seven minutes had passed since I left the NPS Picnic Area on the other side of the old lake bed. Fifty-seven minutes after the dam collapsed, Johnstown was hit by the surging flood wall. 

Modern industries are handling the forces of nature on a stupendous scale. . . . Woe to the people who trust these powers to the hands of fools.”

David McCullough, Johnstown Flood

Notes: 

Dam failures in Pennsylvania are unfortunately not a rare occurrence in the 19th and 20th century, especially tragic in landscapes where rivers, creeks, and runs flow in tight, sluice valleys and towns downstream exist in bowl-like topographies. David Rose, PhD, in The Influence of Dam Failures in Pennsylvania explores how PA dam failures helped create new and (hopefully) effective dam safety law and construction protocol. 

For a more academic investigation of the flood and its aftermath, see this excellent online resource from Bowdoin College "The Johnstown Flood" by Casey Goldberg. In particular, the chapter "Avoidance of Legal Blame" and "Blurring the Lines."  Check out the embedded computer simulation of the flood's path, velocity, and volume (!) 

David McCullough was America's most gifted narrative historian, may he rest in peace. I read his book Johnstown Flood (1968) in the early 1990s. I am re-reading it again as I travel through Pennsylvania's Laurel Highlands on my August road trip.