On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam, which held back Lake Connemaugh on a mountain above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, burst. Twenty million tons of water came crashing down into the valley where the town of 30,000 lay. Over 2200 people died in the flood and in fires that followed that night.

Go here to read three articles from the New York Times about the Johnstown Flood and its aftermath.

We own the children’s book, The Terrible Wave by Marden Dahlstedt, which tells the fictional story of Megan Maxwell, a teenage girl who survives the flood. Mrs. Dahlstedt says in the author’s note in the back of the book: “My interest in the Johnstown Flood stems from the fact that my grandparents survived it. . . I grew up with family stories of the flood, some of which have been incorporated in The Terrible Wave.”

I, too, grew up hearing family stories of a flood–in dry West Texas of all places. On September 17, 1936 my dad’s home near the Concho River in San Angelo, Texas was flooded. My grandmother said she put a baby picture of my dad up in the rafters before she left her house with my dad who was about five years old. That picture is the only surviving photograph of my dad as a baby. My mom, on the other hand, remembers another natural disaster, a 1953 tornado that destroyed much of the Lake View area of San Angelo. According to the San Angelo Standard Times, the tornado killed eleven people.

What natural, or man made, disasters has your family experienced or survived? Do your grandparents or parents tell stories like these? Have you written the stories down for your children to read someday? I wish my parents would write down stories from their childhood and young adult days for my children to have. I’m afraid that even with the simple stories I told in the preceeding paragraph that I may get some of the details wrong. It just seems to me that the way people behave in a crisis tells so much about their character and their ability to cope with everyday life.