Shaped by the past, looking to the future

On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam, located 14 miles upstream of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, gave way. After days of heavy rain, at 3:10 p.m. on that fateful day, a wall of water, estimated at 30 to 40 feet high, rushed down the Little Conemaugh River Valley toward Johnstown.

The Great Flood of 1889 destroyed several smaller towns on its way and hit Johnstown with massive force, sweeping away homes, bridges, and people in one of the deadliest disasters in U.S. history.

The dam held back Lake Conemaugh, a large man-made reservoir owned by the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, an exclusive retreat for wealthy Pittsburgh industrialists that included Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. The fishing and hunting club members were never held legally responsible, despite evidence that the dam had been poorly maintained, but the tragedy led to public outrage and discussions about corporate responsibility and engineering ethics.

More than 2,200 people were killed in the disaster and about 1,600 homes were destroyed as downtown Johnstown was leveled.

Today, the Johnstown Flood National Memorial preserves the site of the dam and educates visitors about the event. One frequent visitor to the memorial, while she was growing up in that part of rural Pennsylvania, was Las Cruces District 5 city councilor Becky Corran.

Much of what drives Corran today began as she learned the history of the place where she spent her childhood. After serving a four-year term on the council, she was re-elected this cycle and looks forward to the opportunity to use what she learned those first four years to be a more effective leader.

“Every year we would go to the museum of the Johnstown Flood, and they would tell us the story,” Corran said. “My family is working class, and neither of my parents went to college and they would tell us the story of rich folks coming and building this sort of beautiful, harmonious place where they escaped the dangers of being wealthy, and they didn't build it that well, and ultimately the flood was caused by an extraordinary rain combined with not very good engineering.”

Corran learned of the poor people who worked for those wealthy industrialists and worked in the railroad, the folks who lived in the valley and saw their homes destroyed if they even lived to tell about it.

“For me that was kind of radicalizing,” she said. “I don't think our teachers meant for it to be radicalizing to us but there we were little kids being shuffled along and seeing pictures of all the thousands of poor people that died in this thing. I think that, combined with just being in a place that was really economically depressed and environmentally exploited, would orient you in a certain way to think about things. That's why things like the data center really make me think about those economies that have existed for a long time where maybe extraction and exploitation is a big part of it.”

By the time Corran left western Pennsylvania, she had witnessed strip mining and eventually fracking as people tried anything to get out of poverty.

“People would just sell their backyards to get $20,000 to have a fracking well put there,” Corran said. “I think those things also really shaped how I understand who wins in these things and who doesn't win. I've been there with the folks who are being exploited in some way for their labor or their resources.”

Educator
Corran brings to the council a wealth of experience as a teacher of public health at Dona Ana Community College. That work experience has helped her develop an interest in the kind of work she’d like to see the council undertake.

“In Pennsylvania, there are so many universities, so many higher ed pathways,” she said. “Here, not so much. It's a really different scene for people who want to get more education. I like working with students where you can influence how they see their future more than seeing students that are self-determined already on a pathway.”

Corran has learned through her life experiences and her interaction with the students the great value of humility. That comes into play in her work on the council.

“The more humble I am, the better teacher I am,” Corran said. “My place is not so much as the sage on the stage. I think that humility is very helpful in thinking about city council-related issues and understanding where people are coming from in every space.”

There’s never one solution to things, one way of fixing something, she said.

“The city council has a tiny sliver of where to change that, and everything else is subject to all these forces,” she said. “I think it's really useful to understand where our sphere of influence is and be able to operationalize things in ways that are meaningful to people's actual daily lives.”

Can’t be a hammer

One of the things Corran has learned in her time on the city council is that most issues can’t be solved by ramming something through. One of her pet issues is animals, and she hoped she could make a big difference in the large number of animals that arrive at shelters every day in Las Cruces. She found out it just isn’t that easy.

“I went in and was saying we need to do this and this and this and fix our animal problem because the shelter right now gets about 30-ish strays a day,” she said. “That's very depressing and I was thinking that when I'm on city council, finally this problem will get fixed. I think one of the things that I've learned is the art of improv.

“Yes, we need to have a new shelter building and yes, we need to have the most progressive policies, and yes, we need to start funding spay and neuter, and yes, we need to support the community organizations that are doing this, and yes, we need to do education and change the laws. I have come to realize there are really just two things that we can do We can change ordinances, and we can put money to things, otherwise we don't have a lot of say.”

What she has realized is that, while she wants to be a hammer, most things are not held together by nails.

“Most of the answers to problems are screws,” Corran said. “I can't go in and hammer things into compliance in any way. It's been a long slog of mine, but I've also figured out we need to decide what we can support."

Heading into her second term, Corran is focused on a few key issues. She wants to continue to push connections with DACC and NMSU, giving more people access to educational and job training programs.

One of the biggest challenges she sees is the uncertainty of the availability of funds, particularly grant funds from the state and federal level, to support infrastructure and other projects. That is a challenge on which she has her eye.

Her life experience has taught her to look out for the little guy, and she wants that to be the focus of her government service.