Johnstown flood | Emergency Preparedness | Forums

Anyone hear of this before? It's a small town in western Pa that has flooded numerous times but 1889 was particularly bad. There was a man made dam that was built to create a lake for rich people from Pittsburgh, mostly steel magnates. Well the dam collapsed.

The Johnstown Flood (locally, the Great Flood of 1889) occurred on May 31, 1889, after the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam on the Little Conemaugh River 14 miles (23 km) upstream of the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, USA. The dam broke after several days of extremely heavy rainfall, unleashing 20 million tons of water (18 million cubic meters) from the reservoir known as Lake Conemaugh. With a flow rate that temporarily equalled that of the Mississippi River,[2] the flood killed 2,209 people[3] and caused US$17 million of damage (about $425 million in 2012 dollars).

The American Red Cross, led by Clara Barton and with 50 volunteers, undertook a major disaster relief effort.[4] Support for victims came from all over the United States and 18 foreign countries. After the flood, survivors suffered a series of legal defeats in their attempts to recover damages from the dam's owners. Public indignation at that failure prompted the development in American law changing a fault-based regime to strict liability.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood

when I see pictures like this, it's the first thing I think of.

Would you live below a dam?