Word: conemaugh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this mid-term election year, last week's special vote to fill a House vacancy in Pennsylvania's Twelfth District, was widely viewed as an early gauge of Watergate's wallop at the polls. The results turned out to be almost as muddy as the Conemaugh River waters that submerged Johnstown, the district's largest city, in the historic flood of 1889. Barring a reversal in a vote review, the Democrats captured a seat that had been held by the late John P. Saylor, a Republican, for 24 years-hardly an encouraging sign to jittery G.O.P...
...just ten minutes, on May 31, 1889, a busy mountain-valley Pennsylvania steel town was wiped out, with 2,209 dead. A soaking rain had begun to fall a day earlier, turning the Little Conemaugh River into a spillway. Flooded streets were commonplace in Johnstown, but the big worry was a huge earth dam, 15 miles away, that held back Lake Conemaugh and its 20 million tons of water. Both lake and dam belonged to a club where Pittsburgh's most powerful families "roughed it." The dam was in bad shape; every time there was a hard rain, some...
...which still stands as the worst catastrophe in U.S. history was that of 1889, which killed 2,300 of Johnstown's 30,000 people and all but washed the town from the map. Johnstown lies in a narrow valley at the junction of Stony Creek and the Little Conemaugh. At 3 p.m. on May 31, 1889, flood waters broke through the South Fork Dam, towering twelve miles away and 300 ft. above Johnstown. A 40-ft. wall of water crashed against the town with Niagara force, carrying with it the wreckage of six villages uprooted...
...first planned to build a series of impounding reservoirs in the hills around Johnstown. But when Army engineers tested this scheme on a scale model, it did not work. Eventually they chose to drain the valley. They widened and deepened the channels of Stony Creek, the Conemaugh and the Little Conemaugh, straightened curves, built concrete banks up to 67 ft. high. They spent $8,670,000 all told. Result: swift-flowing, unobstructed channels that are calculated to carry off any floods that may funnel into the valley...
...chill, foggy morning the President, a navy cape thrown over his shoulder, stood on the rear platform of his car, waved to a crowd at Johnstown while a high-school band played and cheers thundered in vast wavelike surges against the train. Down the Conemaugh River the train moved slowly past the fivemile, $7,600,000 cement flood-control walls that the President had promised Johnstown residents four years before. A sign along the banks read: "Thanks, Mr. President." In Pittsburgh, masses lined the streets solidly, cheering, roaring, waiting: Carnegie-Illinois steelworkers at the plant at Homestead, who last week...