the Johnstown Flood: True Story of Day a Mountain Water Erased an American City

May 31, 1889. A private lake owned by millionaires. A city of 30,000 in the valley below. On the last day of May 1889, after a night of torrential rain, the neglected South Fork Dam gave way in the Pennsylvania mountains. Fifty-seven minutes later a wall of water forty feet high arrived in Johnstown with a city's worth of wreckage on its face. Inside you'll find: - The exclusive club of Gilded Age titans - Carnegie, Frick, Mellon - that kept a dying dam as its private playground- The repairs done cheap, the warnings ignored, and the morning the lake began to rise- The fifty-seven minute journey of the wave, town by town, told hour by documented hour- The Stone Bridge fire, the survivors' stories, and Clara Barton's first great Red Cross campaign- The lawsuits that all failed - and why not one club member was ever held liable Drawn from the historical record and modern engineering studies, The Johnstown Flood restores the day America learned what happens when the powerful hold back a river - and lose.