The water seeping from the broken stone culvert at the base of the Western Reservoir dam was brown with soil. It flowed from a gap where the culvert stones had given way about a week before, carrying particles of the earthen fill with it.
Joseph Leckey found it during a routine check of the dam above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in late July 1862. He was a watchman for the Pennsylvania Railroad, hired to guard the company's equipment at the neglected reservoir and chase off local residents who kept stripping lead from the sluice pipe joints.
The dam was part of the old Pennsylvania canal system that once carried boats and cargo across the Allegheny Mountains. The Pennsylvania Railroad purchased the canal properties in 1857, and the reservoir above Johnstown, no longer needed for navigation, was abandoned to weather, neglect, and the slow theft of its materials.
For years, residents had pulled lead from the joints of the cast-iron sluice pipes that ran through the body of the earthen dam. Every stolen joint opened a path for water to seep into the fill and begin working through the structure from the inside.
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In mid-July 1862, the stone discharge culvert partially collapsed under the accumulated strain. The dam lost its stone discharge culvert, though the discharge pipes inside it remained operable.
On July 18, eight days before the dam would break, the Cambria Tribune published an item noting concern about its condition.
Leckey arrived roughly a week after the culvert collapse and saw the brown water flowing from where the culvert had stood. The water was carrying soil from inside the dam, which meant the earthen wall was eroding from within, its own fill being pulled through the gaps the stolen lead joints had left.
The reservoir still held water at less than fifty feet of depth. If the erosion continued, the wall would hollow out and fail, and everything the water carried would pour down the valley toward Johnstown.
Leckey rowed a boat out to the control tower and opened the discharge valves, letting the water begin to drain and the level behind the dam begin to fall. Then he rode to the nearest Pennsylvania Railroad telegraph station, at Wilmore, and had the operator wire a warning down the line to Johnstown.
The dam broke about twelve hours later, washing out two hundred feet of earthen wall to a depth of fifty feet. The water demolished a house, a sawmill, and hundreds of feet of railroad track, but the opened valves had spent those twelve hours lowering the reservoir, and the telegraph had reached the town: no one in Johnstown died.
Twenty-seven years later, the same dam, rebuilt and poorly maintained by a private fishing and hunting club, failed again on May 31, 1889. No one lowered the water that time, warnings that reached the valley were ignored, and the Johnstown Flood killed 2,209 people.
If the water looked wrong but nothing had broken yet, would you trust what you were seeing enough to act on it?