Johnstown
Flood (Documentary)
Picture: B
Sound: B-
Extras: A Film: A
Mark Bussler's Johnstown Flood is an excellent documentary
about one of the worst tragedies to occur in America during the
1800s. The film first aired on PBS, but
is now available on a well-done DVD that's a must have for history buffs.
Bussler's documentary not only details the horrific flood that
wiped out Johnstown, PA on May 31, 1889, but also gives us a well-researched
history of a town that boomed in the 1800s due to America's growing steel
industry. About 80 miles east of
Pittsburgh, Johnstown sits deep in a Cambria County valley with a river
flowing through it, which has always made it prone to flooding. By 1889, some 30,000 residents called
Johnstown home. A dam was built years
earlier several miles upstream, but the dam hadn't been properly
maintained, which resulted in it becoming an increasingly deep
lake. In fact, robber barons of the
time such as Andrew Carnegie built cottages near the man-made lake and used it
as a private resort in the years before 1889.
Nicely narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, the film details thru
black-and-white drawings, still photos and the accounts of survivors what
happened in Johnstown before, during and after the great flood. The dam had been a source of worry for
Johnstown residents for a couple decades, but there had been so many false
alarms about the dam breaking that many people in Johnstown and nearby towns
had become complacent by May 31, 1889, and ignored the warnings on that fateful
afternoon. An unusually rainy spring
and a heavy series of storms the night before led to the dam finally breaking
on the afternoon of May 31, causing a wall of water nearly 40 feet high to
sweep down the valley crushing everything in its path. As told by Bussler, the film is absolutely
captivating in its description of the tragedy that befell Johnstown and its
people shortly thereafter. Some 2,209 people were confirmed killed,
countless bodies were never recovered, and some of the dead were littered
downstream as far as Pittsburgh and even Cincinnati. This dwarfs the death toll of the recent flooding in New Orleans
by comparison.
The DVD presentation of Bussler's 64-minute documentary is
first rate, including a decent anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 transfer from
digital non-HD video is very good and everything is easy to hear with the Dolby
Digital sound, which is miscredited as 5.1 in some text at large on the
disc. Instead, the documentary is Dolby
Digital 2.0 Stereo with some surrounds.
As if the film itself isn't informative enough, the special features
include a full-length audio commentary by Richard Burkert, the Executive
Director of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association (in simple Dolby 2.0
Stereo), as well as a 20-minute mini-documentary with Burkert showing us around
the museum in Johnstown dedicated to the flood.
- Chuck O'Leary
