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Johnstown Flood- The Great Flood 1889
Johnstown, Pennsylvania was an idyllic little town located where the Little Conemaugh River and Stoney Creek joined to form the Conemaugh River. It prospered with the Cambria Iron Works and by the late 1880s had a population of 30,000. Upstream from the town was the South Fork Dam, which had been previously owned by the state as part of the canal system. As railroads began replacing canals, the dam was sold off to private interests. The dam passed through several different hands and one owner sold the drainage pipes for scrap. This meant the lake could never be drained to make repairs. The dam broke once in 1862, but the…
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Boston’s Great Molasses Flood of 1919
Molasses is delicious, a sweet treat to put on fresh biscuits or use to make gingerbread. It can also be used to make rum, which anyone who has been on a cruise can tell you is delicious. However, for a North Boston neighborhood in 1919 it was the source of one of the strangest disasters in American history. In 1915, the Purity Distilling Company, a subsidiary of the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, built a gigantic tank for molasses in the Boston’s North End. The steel tank was 50 feet tall, 90 feet across, and capable of holding 2.5 million gallons of molasses. On January 15, 1919 it was an…
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Dale Dyke Dam
In the 1850s it was deemed necessary as a result in the increase of mills and industrial works across the edge of Derbyshire into South Yorkshire, to expand the water systems, in an effort to provide not just extra energy and means for these works, but extra water for the domestic use of the workers and residents of the area. As a result plans were drawn up to build a new system of reservoirs to provide this water. South Yorkshire and Derbyshire are home to the Peak district, containing a wealth of barren hills and landscape, including several brooks and rivers, which run down in quite substantial quantities from these…
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The Great New Orleans Fire’s of 1788 & 1794
The fire began on a Good Friday around about 1:30 p.m. at the home of Army Treasurer Don Vincente Jose Nuñez, 619 Chartres Street, corner of Toulouse. The priests refused to allow church bells to be rung as a fire alarm because it was Good Friday. Within five hours almost the entire city was ablaze. There was a strong wind from the southeast which helped spread the flames. Around 856 buildings were destroyed. The fire area stretched between Dauphine Street and the Mississippi River and between Conti Street in the south and St. Philip Street in the north. The fire destroyed virtually all the buildings in what is now known…
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The Sinking of the SS Viking
In 1881, the ship was built by the Nylands Shipyard at Christiania, Norway. Viking was a vessel of 310 gross tons and equipped with a 90 horsepower auxiliary engine. She was launched in 1882 from the Nylands Shipyard. In 1904, Viking was purchased by Bowring Brothers of St. John’s for the sealing industry. She was placed under the command of Captain William Bartlett, who remained her master until 1923. SS Viking was the smallest of the Bowring Brothers’ fleet, but was capable of carrying 276 men. Viking sailed for a number of years hunting the saddleback seal off the coast of Greenland. In 1882, Norwegian explorer, scientist and diplomat Fridtj…
