This was an interesting historical read, especially because I have family in Johnstown and went to the flood museum as a child.

What I really find fascinating is how few of the general public know about the flood today. Reading this book informed me that the flood was not just national but was *international* news. Aide came in from France, Turkey, England, you name it and scale of the disaster was on par with Hurricane Katrina. How did it get so lost in our history?

"The Johnstown Flood (or Great Flood of 1889 as it became known locally) occurred on May 31, 1889. It was the result of the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam situated on the Little Conemaugh River 14 miles (23 km) upstream of the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, USA, made worse by several days of extremely heavy rainfall. The dam's failure unleashed a torrent of 20 million tons of water (4.8 billion U.S. gallons; 18.2 million cubic meters; 18.2 billion litres) from the reservoir known as Lake Conemaugh. With a volumetric 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 (the equivalent of about $425 million in 2012 dollars)." - Wikipedia.

Those are the facts and figures. In The Johnstown Flood, David McCullough gives you all as well as the heart and soul of this heinous catastrophe.

Behind the numbers and stats, and even the human tragedy, there is an evil lurking here. This horror probably wouldn't have happened if not for a "let them eat cake" attitude by an elite few who wanted to maintain their Summer-fun pleasure palaces on a dammed lake perched precariously above a small town in a narrow valley below.



The book on the whole reads like a newspaper feature article or Op-Ed piece that comes out a few weeks after a contentious event where more questions than answers arise after the dust settles. It posits hypotheticals, wondering aloud all the what-ifs the public has been asking.

These days your average joe would be hard pressed to give correct details on the Johnstown Flood. The event is fading into memory as time passes and other tragedies occur. McCullough, who excels at these history snippets (See, this and his 1776 for proof. I highly recommend both,) does an excellent job of recreating the scene, dredging up the past and hosing it off to look, smell, sound and feel as fresh and as horrid as the day it happened.

The Johnstown Flood is an amazing read. David McCullough has done a masterful job of giving both a history lesson with a compelling story. The flood is simple on its surface, but happened during complicated times of the Gilded Age period. This speaks of both the power of the elite, but also of the common man learning to live with impending disaster; becoming used it and ultimately ignoring it.

The Johnstown Flood does a remarkable job of explaining the paradox of the locals knowing the dam was not sound, yet the populace never really believing it would fail. This included the local elite also and they were men of power too.

David McCullough tells his narrative for the whole region by using a few local personal stories to illustrate the setting. Stories of who died or survived and how ridiculously lucky some of them truly were and how thin the line between luck and no luck could be. He talks of heroics of the day and the exhaustion that followed.

The Johnstown Flood is both David McCullough's first book and a tour-de-force of a read. This is one of the great disaster stories told.

David McCullough is one of my favorite historians, and along with another dozen historians over the last forty years, they have literally corrected the "history" of the United States and the world and have made almost everything I learned back in school during the seventies and eighties absolute.

"The Johnstown Flood" is the first major book published by Mr. McCullough fifty years ago. It is the last of two books by this great author that I had not read... Mainly because the subject matter of which I knew very little about did not seem to interest me like his other books.

Naturally, my assumption was wrong and the subject of the great flood that literally destroyed the entire town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania and killed at least two thousand citizens very quickly became a subject of great interest to me. An old earth dam, miles above the town, that was hastily rebuilt to create a lake for fishing and sailing for an exclusive summer resort that catered to industrial tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick.

Warnings about the safety of the dam had been circulating around the area and the nearby towns for years, but very little was done about it. They simply became rumors, until May 31, 1889, when torrential rains savaged the area and the dam broke and the destruction was a catastrophe, uplifting buildings and homes and hundred year old trees like paper machetes and smashing them to pieces... Along with the remains of thousands of people.

The tragedy made headlines throughout the country and there was an outpouring of help from people and organizations from all parts of the country and the world.

It was at the time of the industrial revolution in the United States, and as Mr. McCullough carefully details the dam, the clientele belonging to the resort, and the destruction of the natural barriers that would have prevented such a tragedy were all part of the revolution that would transform the United States and the world. It is a chilling reminder of the power of nature and man's disregard of such power and the deadly consequences of such neglect.

I highly recommend.

The history of the flood was interesting to read. There's a lot of good information here and David McCullough must have spent a lot of time doing research. Everything in this book is meticulously researched.
Looking back, I think this is David McCullough's first book. It's very ambitious. This flood has been incredibly well researched. It couldn't have been easy to dig up some of these newspaper excerpts, the law documents, etc.
However, this book read dryly. It's names, lists, quotes (often repetitive). There are three sections: the building of the dam, the flood and the aftermath/rebuilding. In each of these sections, there are gems and points of true interest. These points make this book worth reading. But it's too long, too detailed with names, lists and quotes.

I've read a later book by David McCullough and it was wonderful. I suggest that this book could have been edited down, and that the inclusion of all the minutiae is because this is the author's first book and he was learning the ropes of writing.

Well told, interesting period of history. Just too wordy.

In reading the first fifty pages or so of this book, I thought I found the McCullough weak link. Boy, I couldn't have been more wrong.

The book started slow, for me, but in retrospect it put me into the mindset of the people in the area of Johnstown: taking normal days and events and thinking they were uneventful. And then the author started to build the flood and unleashed it. Wow! My heart was pounding as I turned the pages (not fast enough) to follow the sequence of disaster and tragedy.

Quite unlike the others titles of his that I've read, thus far, (THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS, JOHN ADAMS, and TRUMAN) in THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD I appreciated many "ordinary" folks, questioned others' motives and attitudes, and felt as if I'd gone through the flood itself.

For me, watching similar disasters on television or in a film doesn't capture what David McCullough was able to recreate because you usually see the end results. Mr. McCullough takes you down the river in a tormented stream, and I felt the bruises afterward.

This book should be read by every American. Every human. I don't really say that often, but this book is incredibly important. McCullough is an absolute treasure. He tells this story with such detail and authenticity, and yet makes it compelling, harrowing even, and utterly human. He is objective and fair, and thorough without slipping into tedium. The parallels to the Katrina disaster are haunting, beyond just the natural disaster and flooding elements. The socio-economic disparities that marked the line between who died and who didn't, the regular warnings ignored by the populace because of their yearly repetition without any actual events, and the response of the nation of generosity and outrage. This book, written in 1968 about events in 1889, is proof that we are repeating the history we haven't learned.

5 ⭐️ I can’t believe I didn’t already know more about this devastating historical disaster in my own state. McCullough brings the stunning and almost unbelievable events to life with incredible detail. Didn’t hurt that this audiobook was read by Richard Gilmore, either. Recommend!!

On May 31, 1879, Johnstown, PA, a mill town built in a level plain between the confluence of two rivers along the eastern foot of the Alleghenies, was devastated, after two-day of heavy rainfall, by a thirty-feet high wave resulting from a catastrophic failure of an earthen dam located 14 miles west of the town. Witnesses who observed this water juggernaut described its power when they wrote how it "snapped off trees like pipestems, or "crushed houses like eggshells" or pushed "locomotives "like so much chaff." Approximately 4 billion gallons of water comprising this tsunami was released when the dam was breached traveling the 14 miles emptying Conemaugh Lake completing its destructive path in 65 minutes. The destruction of Johnstown took ten minutes resulting in the death of greater than 2200 people, many of their corpses intermingled with locomotives and passenger cars, homes, barns and silos with the debris blocking down river bridges. The damage was appraised at $17 million (value today would be $484 million).

Much of the blame for the failure of the dam was placed in the laps of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, touted at the time as "the most exclusive resort in America." Although a previous earthen dam was rehabilitated, it lacked a masonry core and discharge pipes to control the level of lakes. However, little or none of the numerous lawsuits which would have provided some justice for the citizens of Johnstown was ever found in favor of the citizenry.

This is the second of McCullough books that I have read and I have enjoyed both. While doing research at the Library of Congress, McCollough discovered photographs depicting the destruction of Johnstown; however, he found no books on the flood itself. Therefore, he decided to write this book which was published early in his career almost 60 years ago. He conducted extensive research on Johnstown and its geographic terrain, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club and the business aristocracy included in its membership, the earthen dam, and the flood's devastating power. I would have enjoyed college history much better if I had had a professor like David McCullough.

This is one of the best books I ever read. Living in southwestern Pennsylvania, I was always aware of the Johnstown Flood but I had no idea of the socio-economic issues behind this tragedy. Author David McCullough brings the story to life, introducing us to individuals and families living in the area and the unbelievable horrific happenings in Johnstown and the surrounding farms and communities as the flood makes its way through the valley. I could picture what was actually happening from his detailed descriptions. The flood parallels other weather tragedies we have faced in this country and should really be required reading for students of history; on second thought, everyone should read it.

I can't begin to imagine the research McCullough did for this book. It's outstanding from beginning to end; never drags, and every page is packed with interesting details. I'd like to be able to give it more than five stars. It's that good.

"It had been the 'horrible tempest,' with flood and fire 'come as a destruction from the Almighty.' It had been awful, but it had been God awful."
― David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood



I was wrapping a couple of my first edition, eBay book purchases with mylar and discovered my first edition 'The Johnstown Flood' had a bit of water damage to the spine. I took this as a positive portent (ex dīrīs diluvium?) it was time to read it. One couldn't find a better divination that it is time to read a book unless one stumbles upon a pressed butterfly in a Nabokov or dirty photo in a Henry Miller at the Library (which reminds me I need to start carrying butterflies and McGill postcards into public libraries regularly).

I'm not sure what if there is a specific word for the disaster history genre, but I've recently read The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, and now I've just finished a flood history, I've read about volcanoes (Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded) and earthquakes (A Crack in the Edge of the World), so now I just need plagues and pestilence histories and I'll be able to fill my disaster dance card (programme du décès?).



This is McCullough's first book, published in 1968. He was an early master of strong narrative histories. Having been trained at Yale in English and almost fumbled by grace, accident, talent or opportunity into historical writing. Once he started publishing, Mccullough has almost never been a disappointment to his publishers. He now reigns as one of the supreme masters of American popular biography, along with Walter Isaacson, Jon Meacham, Joseph Ellis and Doris Kearns Goodwin. These are the Costco historian set. They aren't always the 'best' or most rigorous historians, but there is a certain skill in being able to carry a story to the historically, unwashed masses. There are certainly better academic historians (Burlingame, etc), but McCullough's skill at telling a story and bringing his story-telling flair to the 1889 Johnstown Flood, makes the history of this very American disaster not just a moving story, but a very good social history.

Some quotes I want to keep:

"When the water was up in the spring, the lake covered about 450 acres and was close to seventy feet deep in places. The claim, in 1889, was that it was the largest man-made lake in the country, which it was not. But even so, as one man in Johnstown often told his children, it was a mighty body of water to be up there on the mountain." (page 41)

"When there were warnings of trouble up the mountain, very few took them to heart. The dam always held despite the warnings. People got tired of hearing about a disaster than never happened. And after all, was not the dam owned by some of the most awesome men in the country? If there was anything to worry about certainly they would know about it." (page 66)

"The water by now, from one end of town to the other, was anywhere from two to ten feet deep. It was already higher than the '87 food, making it, by noon at least, Johnstown's worst flood on record." (page 82)

The dam broke at 3:10pm. "[John G.] Parke estimated that it took forty-five minutes for the entire lake to empty, but others said it took less, more in the neighborhood of thirty-six or thirty-seven minutes. In any case, later studies by civil engineers indicated that the water charged into the valley at the velocity and depth comparable to that of the Niagara River as it reaches the Niagara Falls. Or to put it another way, the bursting of the South Fork dam was about like turning Niagara Falls into the valley for thirty-six minutes." (page 102)



Photo source: Johnstown Flood National Memorial