WARNING

May 29, 2012

For you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, “Peace and safety,” destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.                 1 Thessalonians 5:1-3

This Thursday marks the 123rd anniversary of the biggest story of the 19th century since President Lincoln’s assassination. Two thousand two hundred and nine people perished in a single day, shocking the country, leading to an outpouring of national grief and support, and cementing the reputation of a newly formed and now well-known relief organization.

Care to guess what it is? Here’s a hint: like a 20th century tragedy whose centennial we recently observed, it has to do with water.

Yes, just like the sinking of the Titanic, the Johnstown Flood was a significant event in American history. Twenty million tons of water broke through the South Fork Dam and swept through the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on May 31, 1889, leaving massive destruction and loss of life in its wake. The National Park Service commemorates the disaster at a National Memorial in Johnstown. Every year on that date,  2,209 luminarias are positioned along the remains of the dam and the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Clubhouse, and by the park Visitor Center, from 7:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.

Just recently, I read David McCullough’s 1968 book about the flood. It’s a fascinating story. While there’s been much written about the incident and what led to it, McCullough’s account is generally considered one of the best. Two survivor stories stand out: six-year-old Gertrude Quinn Slattery’s “ride” through the torrents on a mattress, and the account of a teenager named Victor Heiser, who lost both parents in the flood. He went on to become a doctor, and is credited with saving over two million lives by helping develop a treatment for leprosy. He published a book, An American Doctor’s Odyssey, in 1936, and the first few pages relate his harrowing experience.

But before he gets to the actual account of the flood, McCullough sets the stage with what led up that fateful day. Lake Conemaugh, 14 miles upriver from Johnstown, was the pleasure lake of The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, formed by a group of prominent Pittsburgh businessmen. Club members included steel magnate Andrew Carnegie; industrialist and art patron (and some would say robber baron) Henry Clay Frick; attorney Philander Chase Knox, Secretary of State from 1901 to 1921 and twice elected to the U.S. Senate; and Andrew Mellon, head of the Mellon banking firm and later Secretary of the Treasury under Harding and Coolidge, and during part of the Hoover administration. (After the flood, the club formed a relief committee, and was able to fend off lawsuits relating to their role in the carnage; Carnegie also built Johnstown a new library).

Another member was John Fulton, general manager of Johnstown’s Cambria Iron and Steel, who in 1880 evaluated the dam holding back the lake. He found it to be an accident waiting to happen. But while numerous efforts had been made to shore up the dam over the years, for the most part it was badly neglected. And the townspeople knew it.

Johnstown had a history of flooding, and with a torrential rainstorm pounding the town all week, residents were busy preparing for the overflow of The Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek Rivers, as they had in the past. At the dam, meanwhile, officials worked frantically to add height and dig out a second spillway to relieve pressure from the lake’s rapidly rising waters. The resident engineer even sent someone out to warn the nearest town of South Fork.

But it was too little too late. At just after 3:00 p.m., the dam gave way. A train engineer saw the wall of water rushing forward, and tied down his train whistle in a futile attempt to alert residents of the coming calamity. The wave, estimated to have the force of Niagara Falls, swept into Johnstown, becoming a rolling hill of debris approximately 40 feet high and half a mile wide (flood lines were found as high as 89 feet above river level), carrying with it houses, several locomotives, animals and people (dead and alive) it had picked up as it tore through small communities on its journey from the dam. Survivors mentioned that the sound was like a tremendous rumble.

The catastrophe destroyed 1,600 homes and did $17 million (in 1889 dollars) in property damage, wiping out four square miles of downtown Johnstown. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company’s Stone Bridge at the other end of town caught much of the wreckage, piled 40 feet high and spread over 30 acres; the debris then caught fire. Some people continued to be swept down the Conemaugh River to die or be rescued at towns further downstream. Incredibly, bodies were found as far away as Cincinnati, Ohio, and as late as 1911, according to the Johnstown Flood Museum website.

Over $3.5 million was collected across the U.S. and 18 foreign countries to aid survivors and rebuild the area. And it was the first major peacetime disaster relief effort for the American Red Cross, led by Clara Barton. The organization had up to then been thought of primarily as a battlefield relief group, because of its work during the Civil War, but Barton arrived with five other workers shortly after the flood, certain that the Red Cross should help with other, non-war calamities.

Destruction. Disaster. Distress. Death. These same words that apply to the Johnstown Flood are found in Biblical passages referring to the time when Jesus will come again (see Matthew 24 and 1 Thessalonians 5). Although there will be general signs of His return (Matthew 24:6-15), no one except God knows when that will happen, although many will try to predict and attempt to deceive people (Matthew 24:4, 23-26, 36). When He actually does appear, though, there will be no mistake about it—there will be clearly obvious visual and aural phenomena (Matthew 24:27-31).

In the meantime, though, Jesus tells His followers to “keep watch” and “be alert” (Matthew 24:4, 42-44; 25:13; 1 Thessalonians 5:6). “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man,” He warns in Matthew 24:37-39. “For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away.”

But like the people of Johnstown, we too often ignore the warnings in one of three ways. We may actively pursue our own agenda, like the servant who had been put in charge of his master’s property while he was away. “My master is staying away a long time,” the servant says in this parable. He figured the master wasn’t coming back any time soon, so he began to mistreat his fellow servants, and party with abandon. But, “the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and an hour he is not aware of,” Jesus concludes. “He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 24:45-51).

Or we may maintain an attitude of benign neglect, hoping for the best. In his book’s first chapter, entitled “Just Short of Eternity,” Victor Heiser wrote, “[W]ith the passage of time, the townspeople, like those who live in the shadow of [the volcano] Vesuvius, grew calloused to the possibility of danger. ‘Some time,” they thought, ‘that dam will give way, but it won’t ever happen to us.” In another parable about His second coming, Jesus told the story of ten virgins (bridesmaids) waiting for the start of the wedding festivities. They all brought their lamps but half of them neglected to bring enough oil to last through a long period of waiting. “They all became drowsy and fell asleep. At midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’ Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out.’ ‘No,’ they replied,  ‘there may not be enough for both us and you’…The virgins who were ready went in with [the bridegroom] to the wedding banquet. And the door was shut. Later the others also came. ‘Sir! Sir!” they said. “’Open the door for us!’” But he replied, ‘I tell you the truth, I don’t know you’” (Matthew 25:1-12).

Or we can be ready. “Let us not be like others who are asleep, but let us be alert and self-controlled…For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ,” adjures the apostle Paul. “He died for us so that we may live together with Him” (1 Thessalonians 5:6, 9-10).

Maybe you don’t believe the dam ever will break, that there will ever come a day when Jesus will appear again, this time to judge each of us based on our faith in Him (John 3:18, Revelation 20:11-15).  The young Johnstown survivor Gertrude Quinn Slattery, iin her book, described the flood as “like the Day of Judgment.”

Maybe you don’t even believe there is a God. Maybe you think this is all alarmist talk and a bunch of hooey, and you’ll just take your chances on what happens in the next life—if there is one. That’s your prerogative; God never forces anyone to believe.

Yet the engineers at the South Fork Dam and on the train saw it as their duty to sound the alarm about the coming flood, hoping to spare at least some. I would be remiss if I failed to do the same.

One comment

  1. elise daly parker says:

    Fascinating…I had no idea about Johnstown. Very scary. We do not know when the day is coming. I think about 9/11 and how that attack so took us by surprise. We never do know, do we.

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