Disasterology 101

Johnstown PA May 31, 1889

The evidence is in, and it is clear.  Once again, Iowans have interfered in our national elections, sowing confusion among our citizens and undermining confidence in our half-assed apps.  Among so much that is not yet clear is whether the situation should be classified as major debacle or minor disaster.  I opt for debacle.  As always, perspective is called for.  Among the websites I frequent is one called “Word Histories,” run by an indefatigable  etymologist, Pascal Tréguer.  His specialty is the explanation of common (and sometimes decidedly uncommon) English expressions, saws, and figures of speech.  One recent entry was “Don’t spit.  Remember the Johnstown Flood!”  While I doubt it is a common expression, I had encountered it once before in my eighty-three years.  I saw it on a wall placard in a nondescript roadside bar around 1960. 

            I presume you follow the transition here?  The  Johnstown Flood set me to thinking about comparative disasters from an historical point of view.  One is unlikely to avoid thinking about current ones.  So many are reported in the daily press that papers really ought to have a special “Apocalypse Section” at least once a week.  This would cover the body counts achieved by plane crashes, lethal fires, mass shootings, earthquakes, violent storms, common or garden-variety homicides, and really scary medical epidemics including, perhaps, opioid abuse.  A recent headline on an article about the fires in California and Australia caught the spirit: “The Twenty-First Century: Age of Disasters.”

Getting back to the Johnstown Flood of`1889, perhaps the first thing to say about it is that it was not a flood but a tsunami.  Johnstown is a small city straddling a modest river (the Conemaugh) about seventy miles east of Pittsburgh.  A group of wealthy Pittsburg industrialists and country club types had created an extensive private pleasure grounds about fifteen miles upriver from Johnstown, a prominent feature of which was the incorporation of a large lake artificially created by an inadequately designed earthen dam, a relic of the 1840s, restraining the south fork of the Conemaugh.  Disasters waiting to happen frequently tire of waiting.  The dam failed, releasing the hydraulic force of the Delta Mississippi into a modest but rapidly descending stream bed.  The water-wall obliterated several river-bank hamlets before hitting populated Johnstown.  It killed about 2200 people, many of whom suffered agonizing death in floating mountains of burning debris.  No need to worry about the Robber Barons of Pittsburgh; they had excellent lawyers.

The Johnstown Flood was prelude.  The American twentieth century got off to a notably disastrous start with the Galveston Hurricane of 1900—at least six thousand fatalities, perhaps as many as twelve thousand.  The comparatively modest death toll of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 comes nearly as a relief.  But I have skipped over the  Collinwood (Ohio, 1902) school fire with 172 incinerated kiddies and teachers and the Iroquois Theater fire (Chicago, 1903) with more than 600 victims, most of them female, including many children.  You may not have heard of this fire, which lacked the “social interest” historians have invested in the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory (New York, 1911).  Most of the 146 Triangle victims were sweated immigrant women and girls, not bourgeois Chicago matrons idling away a theater matinee, but the human folly that lay behind the horrifying death tolls was remarkably similar in both instances.  I shall leave unmentioned the fate of the Titanic (1912, death toll 1500 plus).  We ought to be able to give that one to the Brits.  The main theme here is American carnage.

Turning to “natural” disasters, Katrina, the storm that went a fair way towards destroying the city of New Orleans in 2005, may have been responsible for upward of fourteen hundred deaths—a huge number swollen by human failure and inefficiency. But so far that’s the worst our century has been able to do.   Superstorm Sandy of 2012, while visiting the northeast with massive property damage, took only about 230 lives, by far the most of them outside the United States.   I somewhat arbitrarily place the attack on the Twin Towers in the category of acts of war—not that acts of war are not disastrous.  But even Nine Eleven and the “endless” Middle Eastern wars following in its wake do not raise the level of the slaughter of the early twenty-first century to that of the early twentieth century.  Remember that on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916) twenty thousand British soldiers died.   By the time the battle was “over” the figure was 300,000.  The death toll for the whole of the Great War was about seventeen million.

Nothing seems more frightening than epidemic disease, and as I write the country seems poised on the brink of panic concerning the coronavirus infection first found in China and now showing up in many other countries, including ours.  The possibility of pandemic is real.  This is nothing to be nonchalant about.  As yet, however, the number of deaths is comparatively small even within China.  Meanwhile “ordinary” flu, though seldom mentioned in the press, has already killed about 8,000 in America.  That might be described as business as usual.  There is by now a national cultural amnesia concerning American mortality statistics for the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.  They are uncertain, but it carried away at least a half a million of a population just over a hundred million.

The most casual survey of world history should convince us that human life is a very fraught business full of danger, difficulty, and lethal adversities of every sort.  “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.”  That’s in the Good Book.  It’s actually something of a wonder that humans have survived at all, but we are right now on a roll.  People have trouble believing that broadly and statistically viewed the human race has never been so well placed as it is now.  For example, vast numbers—really vast numbers-- have quite recently emerged from poverty to lives of modest sustenance.  This development is perhaps hard to see through the smoky blur of Australian wildfires.  But a lot of us apparently don’t want to believe it anyway and are encouraged not to think about it by a press operating under the simple proposition that “If it bleeds, it leads.”  How I’d love to see a headline reading “For Eighth Consecutive Year Nobody Shot at Alabama-Auburn Game”.