This simple reenactment depicts exactly how witnesses describe the South Fork Dam collapse on May 31, 1889. The witnesss descriptions are not dramatic. No “explosion” or the like. The dam “just moved away” is how they described it uniformly. And this recreation depicts the banality of a catastrophe with complete accuracy to eyewitness accounts. A beneficent God would bless Johnstown, Pennsylvania and a wrathful God would damn for eternity the members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, their descendants, and nine generations of their descendants for all time. The names Carnegie, Frick, Mellon, Clark, Knox, and on and on should be banned. We should utter their names no more and their line exterminated.

But there is no such God. Not a God of protective beneficence, nor of righteous, just, punishment. We have a God who watches and who does nothing as those made in his image destroy 2,200 others, innocents, also made in his image. Or we have no God at all.