The walls did their job the night a “1,000 year storm” hit – and now, a computerized model of the 9-mile corridor, and its surrounding watershed, is being created by the Army Corps of Engineers to make sure the channel system would continue protecting Johnstown.
According to Army Corps plan formulator Elliott Porter, it’s a necessary precursor to any local efforts to develop recreation opportunities along the concrete corridor – an idea that has become a key piece of Vision 2025 efforts to revamp the city.
“Before we can start looking at modifications, we have to understand what the impacts are. This is the first step,” he said, noting it will give the Corps the ability to look at both the river walls and the watershed to see what the walls can handle during storms.
The Army Corps is tasked with maintaining the walls to ensure they protect the city from flooding.
But agency leaders also have been partnering with Johnstown leaders who want to see more activity on the banks of the Conemaugh, Little Conemaugh and Stonycreek rivers.
“Without this model, we don’t really have a basis to understand what the impacts might be if we would replace or lower a wall somewhere. This will allow us to understand how it would improve or reduce the protection level,” said Porter.
New look at old technology
The channel system was completed in 1943, in the aftermath of Johnstown’s 1936 St. Patrick’s Day flood.Three days of rain – approximately 7 inches in all and a rapid snow melt – were blamed for the 1936 disaster.
And in its wake, the river walls were designed to handle a flood of that magnitude, Porter said.
In the decades since, those walls have handled major storms and rain seasons without catastrophe.
It was small streams – and broken dams – that were to blame for Johnstown’s 1977 flood, Johnstown Area Heritage Association Executive Director Richard Burkert said.
“The channels worked that day. The Army Corps claims the (flood) water would have been 11 feet higher if it weren’t for those channel improvements,” Burkert said. “It would’ve ended Johnstown.”
Still, that doesn’t mean there isn’t more that can be learned about the system, Porter said.
“What we know about that project, in some ways, is still based on the original 1936 model for it,” said Porter, noting engineers at the time used the best data they had to build the channels.
Now, data specs used to build the river wall system more than 70 years ago are being matched with modern computer mapping technology. By utilizing LiDAR – a light-driven sensing method used to create high-definition 3-D surface maps – and other modern mapping technology, the Army Corps will be able to digitally recreate the system, factoring in areas where surface changes might make water flow differently, Porter said.
By creating a computerized model focusing on hydraulics and hydrology, the Army Corps will be able to look at how water moves into and through the system during storms and how much is absorbed along the way, he said.
All of that is important, Porter said.
Whether water travels through forest land, a low-lying pasture or a winding channel of concrete on its way into Johns-town makes a difference – and it’s something the original model didn’t consider 75 years ago.
Room for ‘growth'?
Today, Johnstown’s concrete channels contain young trees, brush and other vegetation – particularly near Coopersdale.It gives a little life to the otherwise drab corridor of concrete that runs through Johnstown.
But Larry Olek, a city resident who helped lead recovery efforts in the days following the 1977 flood, worries a major storm could make the growth an unintentional accomplice in a future flood.
They could entrap debris, creating choke points along the path or get ripped from their roots and collect along narrow portions of the wall or at the Stone Bridge, said Olek and Ed Cernic Sr., a Tanneryville native who also worked to help the city and its residents rebuild.
“Some of the trees are growing up 20 feet high on the river bed. It’s a potential disaster,” Cernic said.
“Our enemy today is complacency. It’s forgetting history,” Olek said.
For years, Army Corps officials have been monitoring the growth along the 9-mile system.
Porter said the revised model will look closely at the sedimentation and growth along the channel – “and how some of that might be affecting flows.”
“When it comes to those trees and that brush, we need to understand what impact they are having,” he said.
It’s possible the results of the model revision and follow-up review could lead the Army Corps to conduct targeted maintenance projects along the corridor, Porter said.
If the results raise any red flags, the data could be used to urge Congress to allocate funding to address the vegetation, he said.
Requests for added funds to do $60,000 in maintenance work have been made several times in recent years, but the funding ended up on the chopping block before a final federal budget became law.
Linking Johnstown to its rivers again
Porter said the majority of the modeling work should wrap up by late September, so a draft of their update could be ready by early the following month.The Vision 2025 team is being kept up to date on progress – and if all goes according to plan, focused feasibility studies could be getting underway by late 2018 on possible ideas to expand Johnstown’s access to its rivers, said Ryan Kieta, a Vision 2025 community developer.
A Carnegie Mellon study completed two years ago put a spotlight on the fact that many city supporters wanted to see Johnstown reconnect with its rivers – a move viewed as a potential quality of life, tourism and economic development boost.
To spark the effort, a group of seven renowned architects, planners and developers from the Harvard University design school’s Loeb Fellowship led a series of river wall charettes last year.
Working with more than 100 city residents through a weekend-long brainstorming session, they suggested five sites to focus on: Cambria City, the Point, the Inclined Plane, downtown Johnstown’s main bridges and Sandyvale.
And the group recommended adding a mix of art, recreation, redevelopment and environmental restoration.
They proposed terracing one section of the wall for people to sit and gather.
At Sandyvale, Loeb Fellowship experts suggested carving a channel into one section of the river wall bed and adding rocks and boulders around it to create an area where people could fish and recreate.
They also suggested a riverwalk trail near the downtown and Kernville – and in Cambria City, proposed redeveloping a concrete boat launch near Power Street into a colorful corridor that leads to a performance venue.
‘Wheels turning’
Kieta pointed to Lock Haven’s river bank redevelopment as a shining example from which Johnstown could borrow.The 9,700-population city had an amphitheater developed on a sloping stretch of one of its river walls along the West Branch of the Susquehanna in the late 1990s.
A floating stage is docked along the river for summer concerts that draw crowds annually, he said.
Once the Army Corps’ review is complete, members of the Vision 2025 capture team vying to embrace Johnstown’s rivers will be able to begin looking closely at options for the Little Conemaugh, Conemaugh and Stonycreek, Kieta said.
“I’m really seeing excitement (about the project) because nobody’s ever looked at these walls the way they are being looked at now,” Kieta said.
“People are seeing that there’s an opportunity here with these walls. And you can start to see people’s wheels turning a bit.”
It gives Vision 2025 committee members, including Jessica Clifford, a lot to start thinking about – even though it will be some time until the Army Corps’ study begins giving them a framework to work with, she said.
“We can’t wait to get started,” she said. “There’s so many things we’d like to do, but there are still a lot of unknowns,” she said.
Porter said he can understand the group’s enthusiasm.
He grew up in Pittsburgh and recalled a time when the Steel City’s rivers were essentially blocked off from access.
“People are turning back to the rivers, not just as an industrial tool but a place to gather and a resource for people to use,” he said. “Rivers drive recreational tourism.”
©2017 The Tribune-Democrat (Johnstown, Pa.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
