The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough Page B

the first of its musings on what might be the consequences should, by chance, the dam at South Fork happen to let go. Eight days later, on June 10, the dam broke.
    The break was caused by a defect in the foundation near the stone culvert. The accepted theory locally was that various residents had been stealing lead from the pipe joints during the years the dam had been abandoned, that serious leaks had been the result, and that the break had come not long after. Exactly how big the break was is not known, as no records were made and no photographs were taken. The important fact was that though there was much alarm in the valley below the dam, the break caused little damage since the lake was less than half full, the creeks were low, and a watchman at the dam, just before the break, had released much of the pressure by opening the valves. (It was also somewhere along about this time that the wooden tower for controlling the discharge pipes caught fire and burned to the ground.)
    From then on until the Pittsburgh sportsmen appeared on the scene seventeen years later the lake was no lake at all, but little more than an outsize pond, ten feet deep at its deepest point. At the southern end, grass quickly sprouted across acres and acres of dried-up lake bed and neighboring farmers began grazing their sheep and cattle there.
    In 1875 Congressman Reilly, who had spent most of his working life with the Pennsylvania in nearby Altoona, and who must have thereby known about the dam for some time, bought the property and, like the Pennsylvania, did nothing with it. He just held on to it, apparently on the look for another buyer, which he found four years later in Benjamin Ruff. But before selling at a slight loss to Ruff, he removed the old cast-iron discharge pipes and sold them for scrap.
    Ruff’s idea of what to do about the dam was relatively simple and seemed realistic enough at first. He would rebuild it to a height of only forty feet or so and cut the spillway down some twenty feet deeper to handle the overflow. But when he found that this would cost considerably more than repairing the old break and restoring the dam to somewhere near its original height, he chose the latter course.
    The first indication in Johnstown and thereabouts that a change was in the offing above South Fork was an item in the Tribune on October 14, 1879. “Rumors” were reported that a summer resort was to be built by a Western Game and Fish Association. The next day there was a notice calling for fifty men to work, but no name of the organization was given.
    For some reason or other, intentionally or otherwise, the Pittsburgh men kept the correct name of their organization from receiving any kind of public notice. It was a course of action which would later be interpreted as evidence that they had had no desire for anyone to come looking into their business in general, or their charter in particular.
    Ruff set about repairing the dam by boarding up the stone culvert and dumping in every manner of local rock, mud, brush, hemlock boughs, hay, just about everything at hand. Even horse manure was used in some quantity. The discharge pipes were not replaced, and the “engineering” techniques employed made a profound impression on the local bystanders.
    The man immediately in charge of this mammoth face-lifting was one Edward Pearson, about whom little is known except that he seems to have been an employee of a Pittsburgh freight-hauling company that did business with the railroad and that he had no engineering credentials at all.
    The entire rebuilding of the dam ended up costing the club about $17,000, and there was trouble from the start. On Christmas Day, 1879, only a month or so after work had begun, a downpour carried away most of the repairs. Work was discontinued until the following summer. Then, less than a year later, in February of 1881, once again heavy rains caused serious damages.
    No one seems to have been particularly discouraged by all