Hello and welcome to this day an esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, May 31st, 1889, about 60 miles east of Pittsburgh, a catastrophic failure at the

South Fork Dam, unleashed water down the Kamenaw River, wiping out an entire string of mountain homes and towns,

and ultimately rushing through and devastating the city of Johnstown.

The flood killed 2,209 people, the largest civilian loss of life in the US at that time.

Bodies were found as far away as Cincinnati, Ohio, and as late as 1911.

One third of the dead, 777 people were never identified. The

remains were buried in a plot of the unknown at Johnstown's Grandview Cemetery.

This is of course the Johnstown's Town's Grandview Cemetery.

This is of course the Johnstown flood, which I think just really lives in the public imagination

in many ways as one of the most notable disasters in American history, a moment when a booming town was wiped out by a wall of water

unleashed, so the story goes, because of negligence on the part of wealthy developers who didn't care to notice

or just didn't care to care that they'd put a

working-class region in perilous danger. So here to discuss the Johnstown floods

are as always Nicole Hammer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.

Hello Jody. Hey there. Yeah you know to me I mean there's like a Johnson

Flood reference in a gosh it's just so horrific a lot of the disasters and I think I wanted to include that line about

you know a third of the dead not even being able to be identified because it really just gives a sense of how much this community was not just

devastated but really in this sort of horrific way by by this incident.

Mm-hmm. This story is just like it's's really haunting, you know, when you think about the

devastation, the numbers of people that died, how whole families died, children died, children were left orphaned.

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