Johnstown - Marrch 13, 2012

Another beautiful day in New Jersey, strolling around Princeton. Geocoaching with Daniel... not much budding out on the trees, but high temps in the 60'sF. And Anya is happily at home with Betsy and Ramon who are housesitting.

I read through David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood. What I said in an earlier post about survivability still holds: people build for an everyday life with a "usual" regular crisis in mind... the people of Johnstown knew the river would flood in the spring, most likely. It usually did. They were used to the houses nearest the river getting water in the basements. And there had been talk forever about the dam upstream, and how it was unstable and "likely to go at any time." But then it kept not breaking, and people got used to that.

And then there was a storm of the century. And the dam overtopped, and more than 2000 people died, and several towns were effectively wiped from the map.

One of the most terrifying things about any disaster is the randomness of survival. Some entire families (99 according to McCullough) died outright. Many more lost members, and McCullough goes into harrowing detail about how families were split up: one young girl huddled in the third floor of her house, and watched while two other household members literally feet away fell through the floor and were drowned. She floated away on a mattress and survived.

Some disasters simply swallow everything and everyone in sight: volcanoes and firestorms for example. Some mudslides. Some bombs. And it feels as though floods ought to be the same way, especially wall-of-water floods like Johnstown. I've always pictures tsunamis as like that: a literal wall of water slamming into the shore. But water doesn't really work like that: it wants to spread out and seek its lowest point. And so, if you watch films of the recent tsunamis in Japan and Sumatra, you see a surge of water not as a cresting wave but as a sudden rise in the normal rushing flow. The net effect in terms of what gets submerged is the same: areas that were dry are suddenly underwater. And it doesn't really matter that it's a rapidly rising flow and not a "wall of water" that hits structures and pushes them around: water is heavy and rushing water contains a lot of force.

I think this is the thing that seems counterintuitive about flooding to landlubbers like me: we forget just how strong flowing water is. It doesn't take a cresting wave to knock you down. Waist-high water with less-than perfect footing will do just fine.