Ruthless Tide: The Tragic Epic of the Johnstown Flood

Imagine 14.55 million cubic meters of water from a private human-made lake rushing down a mountainside, laying waste to towns, factories, railroads and homes, and killing 2,209 people after its dam failed from a relentless rainstorm and years of deliberate neglect from corporate greed. While this sounds like the plot of an ecodisaster movie, this "Great Flood" actually occurred in May 1889 in the steel-manufacturing region surrounding Johnstown, PA. NBC's Today show cohost and weatherman Roker (The Storm of the Century) recounts the stories of the townspeople who were victims of Gilded Age excess. He details how the flood-prone region's rivers and ecosystem were compromised by factory run-off, excessive development, and the failure of the dam, which also contained the lake at a private fishing resort frequented by business tycoons such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick.