TV Reviews : Reliving Nightmare of ‘Johnstown Flood’

“The Johnstown Flood” is simple, elegiac--and packs a dramatic wallop that far exceeds its modest appearance. It airs on “The American Experience” tonight at 9 on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15 and at 8 p.m. on KVCR Channel 24.

This expanded version of Charles Guggenheim’s 1989 Academy Award winner for best documentary (short feature) skillfully mixes live re-creations (which convey a sense of time and place all too rare in most documentaries) with archival material to offer a compelling slice of history.

The facts are well known: At 3:10 p.m., May 31, 1889, the dam above Johnstown, Pa., failed; within 10 minutes, 2,200 were dead and the town’s center was devastated. But “Flood” is more than just a chronicle of a disaster--it is the story of the not-benign neglect of the rich folks who lived 14 miles upstream, the people who owned the dam and who partied on the lake behind it.

Much of the new material in “Flood” comes from rare photographs taken by Louis Clarke, the son of one of the wealthy Pittsburgh families that summered at the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club at Lake Connemaugh.

Among other problems, the previous owner of the dam had sold the water runoff pipes for scrap after the dam had failed on him. This ensured future trouble; there was no way to drain the lake during heavy rains. The new owners--the Carnegies, Mellons, Fricks and other Pittsburgh elite--let their buddy Benjamin Ruff, the club’s president, handle maintenance. Ruff ignored warnings from Daniel J. Morrell, head of the Cambria Iron Works, Johnstown’s largest employer, that his engineers had declared the dam unsafe. Ruff even refused Morrell’s offer to share the cost of repairs.

The film’s coda is a timeless moral delivered by “American Experience” host and historian David McCullough: “It is a great mistake, possibly perilous, ever to assume that because people were in positions of responsibility, they were therefore behaving responsibly.”