The Johnstown Flood (8 page)

The town hospital was built by the company and anyone injured on the job received free treatment there. It was the company also which had established the library and a night school where its employees could learn elementary science, mechanical drawing, and engineering. At the company store, Wood, Morrell & Company, which advertised itself as “The Most Extensive and Best Appointed Establishment in its Class in the United States,” prices were quite reasonable. At the time the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was organized, Cambria Iron had somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million invested in Johnstown and along the valley. So Morrell, very understandably, had special interest in what the Pittsburgh men were up to. That he held no special good feelings toward some of the clubmen also seems likely.

When Carnegie, who had once stoutly proclaimed that “pioneering don’t pay,” decided the time was right to get into the Bessemer steel business and Carnegie, Phipps & Company built the Edgar Thomson works at Braddock in the early 1870’s, he had raided Cambria Iron of its best workers. Among these men, most of whom had been working with pneumatic conversion techniques since Kelly’s days in Johnstown, was the tough, gifted little Welshman, Bill Jones.

Captain Bill Jones, as he was known, had been with Morrell for sixteen years. He had acquired a vast knowledge of the new process and had built a tremendous following among the men at Cambria Iron, largely for his robust, freewheeling willingness not to do things according to the rules if the rules did not suit him. It was the sort of reputation Carnegie took a special interest in. Carnegie never did learn much about steelmaking, but he had a gift for finding men who did, and if they were somewhat unorthodox, so much the better.

When the manager of the Cambria works, George Fritz, died and Morrell had to pick a man to replace him, he turned Jones down for the job, giving it instead to another Jones who seemed a steadier sort. At which point Carnegie immediately moved in and offered Bill Jones a two-dollar-a-day job at Braddock. Jones not only accepted but took a number of his “high-class graduates” along with him. Within one year, by 1876, the Edgar Thomson mill moved ahead of Cambria in production. Carnegie, on a mountaintop in Italy, literally danced with joy on hearing the news. And as Edgar Thomson continued to break every other production record, it was Bill Jones, not Carnegie or his associates, who got the credit from anyone who knew anything about steelmaking. Jones’s papers on production techniques were read before learned societies in Europe. In Pittsburgh he became so important to the Carnegie empire that Carnegie decided to make him a partner, an offer which Jones flatly refused, feeling that he would lose his influence with the men if he ever so openly joined forces with management.

“Just pay me one hell of a salary,” Jones said to Carnegie.

To which Carnegie shot back, “All right, Captain, the salary of the President of the United States is yours.”

“That’s the talk,” said Jones. The salary was $25,000 a year.

So now, if the Pittsburgh crowd was about to go tampering with the South Fork dam, Daniel J. Morrell wanted to know more about their doings than could be gained from mere hearsay. There was too much at stake to go on their word alone. He had no intention of stopping them, as he made clear later on. He had never been one to stand in the way of progress. He had welcomed innovations throughout his working life, and it seems he never objected to this one on principle. He only wanted to be satisfied that the work was being properly managed. He had seen enough explosions and fires at the mill to have a fair idea of the violent consequences of bungled innovation. He had also had some experience with dams, having personally supervised the installation of several small ones put in near town by the water company.

In November of 1880 he sent John Fulton to look over the job. Fulton was an engineer by training and profession, but he was also the next in line to succeed Morrell as head of the works. Morrell, in other words, was not just sending any ordinary employee to South Fork.

A lean Ulster County Irishman, Fulton wore his beard close-cropped and had a fix to his mouth like General Grant’s. He had wonderfully heavy eyebrows and a resolute gaze that gave him the look of an Old Testament prophet. He was a man to reckon with, one of Johnstown’s most ardent temperance leaders and a pillar at the Presbyterian Church, where he taught Sunday school and would be long remembered for closing his Bible classes with the most interminable prayers ever uttered by man.

Fulton had made his reputation as a mining engineer and geologist before joining Morrell at Cambria Iron. That there was anyone in Johnstown better qualified to pass judgment on the dam is doubtful. Nor was there any man, save Morrell himself, who was less likely to be dazzled or cowed in any way by the representatives of the club, a factor which Morrell must have taken into account.

Fulton was met at South Fork by two club members, Colonel E. J. Unger and C. A. Carpenter, as well as some of the contractors who had worked on the dam. His report was filed in a letter to Morrell dated November 26. The letter began by stating that he had gone as requested to inspect the dam now owned by the “Sportsmen’s Association of Western Pennsylvania.” (The correct name of the club was evidently still unknown to the Cambria management.) He then said that he did not think the repairs were done in “a careful and substantial manner, or with the care demanded in a large structure of this kind.” He stated that he believed the dam’s weight was sufficient to hold back the water, but that he had grave misgivings about other aspects of the dam:

Morrell promptly sent the report to Ruff, who responded on December 2.

Ruff was not much impressed by Fulton’s findings. He pointed out to Morrell that Fulton did not have the correct name of the club, and told Morrell what that name was. He said there was no leak such as Fulton claimed and that Fulton’s figures on the comparative weights of the water and the dam were off, since Fulton had overestimated how much water was in the lake. The tone was one of obvious impatience and suggested not very subtly that Morrell would do well to hire himself a more competent man. He ended the letter by saying:

Ruff, quite clearly, was not in the least interested in continuing the discussion. The club had managed nicely to keep its affairs private until then, and the idea of any prolonged or possibly complicated negotiations with the Cambria Iron Company had small appeal.

Morrell, however, was unwilling to let it go at that. On December 22 he answered Ruff’s letter. After a few opening courtesies, he got to the heart of the issue:

Morrell, in short, was suggesting exactly what Fulton had urged: give the dam a major overhaul and install a discharge system of some sort. At the same time, he was making it plain that Cambria Iron considered the present job shoddy enough, the situation critical enough, to be willing to help foot the bill to set things right.

The offer was declined. The matter was dropped—almost.

Morrell felt that just to be on the safe side it might be a good idea to have an inside view of doings at the lake. So he decided to join the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, and evidently the Pittsburgh men had no objections. Morrell therefore purchased two memberships in his own name.

It was not for another nine years that engineers from many parts of the country came to the site of the dam to study what had gone wrong. Fulton’s findings appeared to have been correct. But there were four other changes in the dam which Ruff and his men had made which Fulton had not noticed, and these were as crucial to what finally happened as the faults Fulton cited.

To begin with, in order to provide room for a road across the breast, the height of the dam had been lowered from one to three feet. This would give enough width for two carriages crossing the dam to pass each other comfortably. But it also meant that the capacity of the spillway had been reduced, for now the bottom of the spillway was not ten or eleven feet lower than the crest of the dam, but perhaps only seven or eight feet. This was a very significant change, since it meant that a rising lake would start to go over the top of the dam that much sooner.

Then, too, a screen of iron rods, each about half an inch in diameter, had been put across the spillway to prevent the fish from going over and down into South Fork Creek. The screen was set between the heavy posts which supported the wooden bridge over the spillway. Under normal conditions the combination of posts and screens decreased the spillway capacity only slightly, but they had the potential of decreasing it a great deal should the screens become clogged with debris.

The third change was probably the most important of all. The dam sagged slightly in the middle, where the old break had been. Exactly how bad the sag was no one was able to say later for certain. It may have been only a foot or two, but according to one study, the crest at the center may have been as much as four feet lower than the ends. The center was where the dam should have been highest and strongest, so in the event that water ever did start over the top, the pressure would be at the ends rather than at the middle. Now the reverse was the case.

To have seen the sag with a naked eye, and particularly an untrained eye, would have been next to impossible. It is conceivable therefore that it went unnoticed by Ruff and the men who did the reconstruction work. Fulton took no note of it apparently; whether it would have been observed and corrected had experienced engineers been responsible for the reconstruction is a question no one can answer.

What it meant in practical terms was that the depth of the spillway was now only about four feet lower than the top of the dam at its center. In other words, if more than four feet of water were going over the spillway, then the lake would start running over the top of the dam at the center where the pressure against it was the greatest.

The fourth change was unnoticed by Fulton because it had not as yet taken place when he made his inspection. The water then, as he says, was only forty feet deep, which is about the depth it had been kept at during the old days before the first break in 1862. The club, however, brought the level of the lake up to where it was nearly brim full, meaning that the depth ran to sixty-five feet or thereabouts. In spring it sometimes rose even higher. With the lake that full, it was not beyond reason to imagine serious trouble in the event of a severe storm.

But, as both Fulton and Morrell had made abundantly clear, with the discharge pipes gone, the club was faced with the unfortunate position of not being able to lower the level of the lake, ever, at any time, even if that were its expressed wish.

The water that high at the dam also meant that the over-all size of the lake was increased. The lake backed up well beyond where it had been in the old days, which lead to the widespread misconception, still current today in and around Johnstown, that the club had actually raised the height of the dam from what it had been.

How satisfied Morrell was after the business of the letters was over and done with is not known. For when the sun went down behind Laurel Hill on Monday, August 24, 1885, Daniel J. Morrell was in his grave at Sandy Vale. He had been ill for several years, having suffered what appears to have been an advanced case of arteriosclerosis. He had gone into a steady mental decline not long after he took out his membership in the South Fork fishing club. In 1884 he had given up all his various civic responsibilities and retired from business. After that, it seems, senility closed in hard and fast. He was seen almost never, “lost in mental darkness,” as one account put it years later. When he died, “calmly and peacefully” at eight in the morning on Thursday, August 20, 1885, he was sixty-four years old.