Imagine the squirrel newspaper headline “Tree with a house lodged in it”

Describing this Johnstown flood as “flooding” doesn’t quite capture the true horrifying magnitude of the disaster - its better to think of it as a very fast tsunami, full of barbed wire, that was also on fire. And this was all in the mountains, so there werent things like flood mitigation.

IIRC they had to bring in mining equipment and blast the debris to be able to clear them out, there just wasn’t anything else you could do. Drifts got to 45’ tall and everything was tangled together with barbed wire so that it essentially couldnt be moved. Just an absolutely insane disaster.

From the wikiepdia page:

The small town of Mineral Point, one mile (1.6 km) below the viaduct, was the first populated place to be hit with this renewed force. About thirty families lived on the village’s single street. After the flood, there were no structures, no topsoil, no subsoil in Mineral Point – only the bedrock was left.

Imagine how bad insurance claims were back in 1890.

Nah, that’s just the housetank prototype.