If David McCullough wrote it, it's worth reading. His books read like front-page news, but with detail, trustworthy accuracy and interior-page sidebars that add scope and clarity to the setting, circumstance and players. It isn't possible not to be drawn into the time and place of his historical investigations. Just try to remain detached from the shock, awe and carnage of The Johnstown Flood (Simon and Schuster 1987).

On May 28, 1889, fueled by storm clouds that had gathered on the Central Plains, rain began falling in the Conemaugh Valley of southwestern Pennsylvania. In that steep-sided Alleghany Mountain valley was the iron-manufacturing community of Johnstown, with a population of about 30,000, predominately Welch and German laborers. Fourteen miles and 450 feet of elevation up the valley from Johnstown was the mainly earthen South Fork Dam, backing up flows from Stony Creek and the Little Conemaugh River. This formed Lake Conemaugh, 2 miles long, a mile across at its widest expanse and inundating about 400 acres in spring. It was 60 to 70 feet deep near the dam and held approximately 4.8 billion gallons (20 million tons) of water. The lake was the exclusive summertime domain and resort of wealthy members of the South Fork Fish and Hunt Club, most of who resided in Pittsburgh, 55 miles to the west. Outflows from the lake were few, minimal and stressed. Inconvenient overflow devises had been removed.
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The rains continued through May 30, becoming a deluge believed to have delivered 6 to 10 inches of rain in a 24-hour period. Before the real flooding, water stood some 10 feet deep in portions of Johnstown.
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As the morning of May 31 emerged darkly and sodden, with rain still of nearly blinding intensity, a gallery of mortified onlookers safely above the South Fork Dam witnessed the lake rise alarmingly and finally broach the concaved center of the 72-foot high, 930-foot long dam. The additional hydrological pressure of the unprecedented rainfall, extensive runoff from uplands and particularly inflow from the lake's tributaries caused the dam to disintegrate, not bomb-like, but with gradual, unrelenting resignation and sloughing at the center. What it unleashed was bomb-like and both relentless and merciless. With a force equivalent to the Niagara River, Lake Conemaugh drained in less than an hour and pitched down toward Johnstown, first taking several smaller villages wholly and many of their inhabitants with it. ?
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Like a rogue wave, the floodwater quickly mushroomed across the Conemaugh Valley floor and was approximately 20 feet high, rising to 60 feet where it smashed into steeply pitched valley walls. Alternately enervated and reenergized by the landscape contours, it surged along at 10 to 40 miles per hour, plunging, spilling and ricocheting toward an already saturated, mainly unsuspecting and entirely unprepared Johnstown. The tsunami was a black, roiling mass of disintegrated buildings, uprooted trees, miles of fencing, bodies, debris, mud and water that hurtled with growing momentum toward the city. Its terrifying noise and the frantic bells and screams of alarm sent residents and others scrambling up hillsides. Only because it arrived during daytime, most people survived. More than 2,200 people and Johnstown did not.

With vivid, fascinating and horrifying detail, McCullough's The Johnstown Flood masterfully recounts with personal and general dimensions the beforehand, happenstance and aftermath of one of the most calamitous events in American history. It also triggered or reinforced the perception of really rich guys being able to deflect culpability for environmental damage. And it upheld the stereotype of rich guys' glib, slicker-than-snail-poop barristers, who argued that Divine Intervention, not the South Fork Fish and Hunt Club's shabbily engineered and weakly maintained dam, was the deflection. No divinity was subpoenaed, so the club members, in denial, found cover in circumspection and silence.
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But if the club members failed to respond responsibly or adequately, the rest of the nation (and 18 foreign countries) did. The rush to aid the Johnstown survivors was unprecedented in history. The ultimate good that came from the flood was extensive, but it was measurable only by the chance or time and by those not its living victims. The account of relief is almost a book within a book, and McCullough's discussion of it, a mere summary, is riveting. Photos of the devastation exceed credulity. ?
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Not a pointed aspect of the book, but something I found intriguing was that the denial of responsibility by and defensiveness of the South Fork Fish and Hunt Club triggered public outrage at the club, not at the individual, rarely publicly identified members. The leisure of sportsmen was censured. Interestingly, nothing is mentioned of members hunting at or near the club or why the club's name even included suggestion of hunting. But recreational fishing took a hit. To my knowledge, that was the first widespread criticism of angling and, by association, hunting. Even if not the first, the venting at the club and its activity may have triggered jaundice toward perceived irresponsible and preemptive "leisure" of outdoor pursuits?"anti" sentiment that has its annoying disciples today. ?
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Shortly after reading this gem of a book, more than 20 years after it first appeared in print, I happened across a television broadcast of the movie "Evan Almighty." A cute, dopey flick, it features a massive dam break and flood. I saw unnervingly, from the high ground of cinema, something akin to what the citizens of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, experienced at eye and mortality levels, and I didn't find the two-minute scene cute at all. ?