August 19, 2008

August 19, 2008

We spend the morning driving west across Pennsylvania. Our first stop is the Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site. After the opening of New York’s Erie Canal, Philadelphia rapidly lost shipping business to New York City. Pennsylvania was in a hard spot. The steep Allegheny Mountains stood in the way of them building a canal across their state. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. In response the Pennsylvanians devised a series of stationary steam engines to hoist canal boats on a rail track up and over the steep Allegheny Mountains. After watching the Visitor Center movie, we walk out to the reconstructed power plant that sat on the peak.

Our next stop is the Johnstown Flood National Memorial. Johnstown, a former steel town, sits on a flood plain at the bottom of a steep valley. Upstream in 1899 sat a resort lake held back by an old and poorly maintained dam. After a very rainy May, the dam burst channeling the floodwater down the valley straight to Johnstown. It was wiped off the map killing over 2200 people. The ceiling of the Visitor Center has a large diorama with flood debris and a survivor clinging to his roof. We watch a very moving film about the tragedy and then walk out to view the remains of the dam. In the aftermath, the millionaire owners of the resort were sued for negligence, but the court ruled that it was an Act of God. My how times have changed.

Our last stop is the Flight 93 Memorial. On September 11, 2001, after planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, a fourth plane was headed directly for our Capitol building. The forty passengers and crew of this United flight rebelled and retook the hijacked plane but not before it was crashed into this central Pennsylvania farm field. This temporary memorial consists of several rows of park benches stenciled with the victims names surrounded by lots of sentimental items left by mourners. A volunteer ranger gives a group of us a chilling review of that day’s events.

We spend the evening at a park outside Pittsburgh, PA.