Local elementary students help honor victims of 1889 Johnstown flood

Forest Hills Elementary School students partnered with rangers from the National Park Service's Johnstown Flood National Memorial Friday; each student in the school got a chance to help the rangers create luminaries that will be lit on the evening of May 31st to honor the lives lost in the 1889 Johnstown flood.

The kids wrote the names of all 2,209 people whose lives were claimed by the waters on white paper bags, and then filled those bags with sand.

The school district has had a 20-year partnership with the Flood Memorial that has allowed generations of students to participate in honoring the flood victims.

This year marks the 135th anniversary of the great flood.

Forest Hills Elementary fifth grade language arts teacher Scott Lashinsky said, “What’s national history is our local history, and we want the kids to understand that this is something that is known throughout the country, if not the world, as one of the greatest natural disasters of all time. We live right here; some of the students live in the flood bed of Lake Conemaugh.”

Some older students within the Forest Hills School District will then help the rangers set the luminaries around the flood memorial grounds in preparation for the annual wreath laying ceremony that will take place on the abutment of the failed dam on the anniversary date.

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