One of America's greatest tragedies is curiously absent from most U.S. history textbooks. On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam failed, and the ensuing flood killed 2,209 people living in and around Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
The tragedy remains one of the darkest in American history. According to a list compiled by Wikipedia (which excludes epidemics), its death toll ranks as the #6 worst in U.S. history, coming in behind the 1900 Galveston hurricane (6,000-12,000 dead), the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (3,000-6,000 dead), the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane (3,000+ dead), the 9/11 terrorist attack (2,996 dead), and Pearl Harbor (2,466 dead). The far more infamous sinking of the Titanic comes in at #11, with some 1,500 deaths.
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