Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles

by Standiford, Les

  In all, the process allowed the dam to be built for about one-sixth of what it would have cost using the old steam-shovel-and-wagon, old-women-carrying-dirt-in-their-aprons method, project superintendent Stanley Dunham said. Though work on the aqueduct itself was nearing completion, as was the dam, Mulholland told reporters that it would take another six months to complete the pipeline that would connect the dam through the Franklin Canyon to the city’s water system.

  Excitement continued to mount in Los Angeles as word traveled down from the Owens Valley. On February 13, “While the snow-crowned peaks looked on,” and “a woman in furs” smashed a bottle of champagne atop the concrete gates, “eight men turned iron wheels that opened the flood gates and the cold crystal waters of the Owens River rushed through the intake into the upper sixty-eight-mile division of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.” Among the eight, predictably, were Mulholland and J. B. Lippincott, with Harvey Van Norman joining them as well. In fact, the fur-clad woman was Bessie Van Norman, the engineer’s wife, the same person whose thwarted arrival in the valley years before had nearly caused Van Norman’s resignation.

  The sixty-mile Owens Valley portion of the aqueduct beginning at the diversion gates above Independence and ending at the Haiwee Reservoir below Owens Lake was now complete. Beyond the four gates, each 8 feet high and 8 feet wide, the water would ride about 20 miles in an unlined canal 62 feet wide and 10 feet deep, to allow the flow to absorb the considerable amount of groundwater percolating in that area. At the Alabama Hills, the aqueduct became a 40-mile-long concrete-lined canal 34 feet wide and nearly 13 feet deep that hugged close to the mountains, overlooking its former destination at Lake Owens, until it reached the Haiwee Reservoir, 3,760 feet above sea level.

  The dam at Haiwee was built across the canyon where the Owens River had run in ancient times and had walls at both its lower and upper ends, containing a reservoir more than seven miles long and anywhere from a quarter to a half mile wide. The artificial lake would hold 21 billion gallons of water, enough to supply the city for sixteen months at its then daily consumption of 40 million gallons a day. With the gates open at full-bore, it would take nearly two months for the reservoir to fill.

  “It was a great sight to see the water rush through,” Lippincott told reporters at the ceremony. The party intended to follow the first gush of water all the way to Haiwee, he said, though they would be staying overnight at Lone Pine in the process, for it would take the waters, flowing at about two miles per hour, a day or so to get to the new reservoir. From that point, all that remained to connect that vast new lake with Los Angeles, Mulholland said, was about a half mile of shovel work, three miles of ditch lining, and the completion of one 2,000-foot tunnel in San Francisquito Canyon, all of which he thought could be finished in the following six weeks. As has been noted, however, aqueduct affairs would never again be free of political intrigue that complicated matters. Though Mulholland had bowed out of consideration, the mayoral race hinged in large part upon aqueduct issues, prompted in part by the final publication of the Aqueduct Investigation Board’s report in January. In addition, controversy continued in advance of the high-line bond issue, which was finally rescheduled for April.

  The Times reprinted Mulholland’s scathing letter to his bosses as part of a two-page spread on April 13, just two days before the bond election. The results were a vindication of the Chief’s passionate statements. On Question #4, as to whether to issue $2.5 million to begin construction of the “high line,” some 15,000 answered in the affirmative; more than 32,000 said no. As to the $1.5 million in bonds needed to complete work on the connection of aqueduct water, the vote was 46,792 for, 4,798 against. If the Chief had indeed been wondering if the people had stopped listening to him, the results would have erased such doubts.

  As to the mayoral election the following month, Job Harriman ran again for the post, but the effects of the McNamara case had never left him; he finished third behind two Independent candidates, neither of whom was able to reach a majority. Henry Rose won the ensuing runoff, but only when a considerable number of Socialists swung his way in exchange for a promise to “clean up” operations in the aqueduct department. The day after his election in June, Rose announced that he had learned of greater waste on the project than he could ever have imagined and declared that he would make a personal inspection of the line later in June. Following that trip, however, Rose returned to the city to tell a reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner on September 16 that he had seen no evidence of the rumored pollution, poor construction methods, or inefficiency. All such criticism, “so far as I am able to determine,” Rose said, “is captious.”

  Despite Rose’s report, there had in fact been one miscalculation on a difficult portion of the project, however. Since March, Mulholland had been concerned with the huge 2,800-foot siphon at Sand Canyon, which with its drop of 442 feet below grade made it the second deepest after the Jawbone. Unlike the other siphons, which had been constructed of concrete or steel pipe, the Sand Canyon Siphon, about 100 miles below the intake point and 150 miles north of Los Angeles, consisted of two tunnels bored precipitously down through the slopes of opposing rock walls (the bores were grouted with concrete) with a steel pipe running across the canyon floor to connect them. The bore on the north side was about 640 feet long and 9 feet in diameter and descended the canyon at a 45-degree angle. Water ran in a pipe across the canyon floor for about 1,500 feet, then entered the opposing 45-degree bore for a climb of 632 feet back up to grade. Because the cliffs were solid granite, so hard that miners needed to up the charge to blast through by 25 percent, it was assumed that the tunnels would be as strong as, if not stronger than, pipes of inch-thick steel.

  However, when engineers began to test the line on the north side of the canyon, ominous seepages appeared in the sheer rock wall there. When the tests were repeated on the south side of the canyon, similar seepages developed. On Monday, May 19, Mulholland returned and gave orders to send waters through the siphon at full force.

  As everyone waited apprehensively, the torrent gushed down the north side of the canyon through the bore, then hurtled on through the steel pipe on the canyon floor and began its rush up the tunneled rock on the opposite side. There then came a thunderous roar as—impossibly—the solid rock wall before them blew apart, sending thousands of tons of boulders and fractured rock to the valley floor below. In all, nearly half a mile of tunnel—bored through what had appeared to be solid rock—was ruptured almost instantly. “The incline tunnels failed spectacularly,” as Mulholland put it, and “the side of the mountain was lifted bodily and shattered into a mass of debris.”

  The dramatic setback—which thankfully cost no lives—did not take Mulholland completely by surprise. He told reporters, “That is the only point in the whole system that I have ever had the slightest doubt about,” he said. That’s why he had come up, “for the very purpose of giving it a good kick and making sure.” As for the rupture, he said, it was better to know ahead of time rather than when the water was flowing to the city. Though the north side of the rock siphon had held, they would take no chances. Both rock tunnels would be abandoned and replaced with steel pipe, Mulholland said, at a cost of about $28,000. It would also mean a delay of at least three months, which would postpone the arrival of the water to the San Fernando Reservoir until fall.

  Though a program describing the planned festivities had already been drafted, it was scarcely any concern of Mulholland’s. Until his work was done, celebrations would simply have to wait.

  CASCADE

  IT WAS LATE SEPTEMBER 1913 BEFORE THE NEW STEEL SIPHON was completed at Sand Canyon, a task that constituted the last remaining item of significance on Mulholland’s checklist. At noon on Thursday, September 25, and following a visual inspection of the new pipe, Mulholland phoned from Sand Canyon up to Haiwee, instructing his men to open the gates at the reservoir. It took seven hours for the water to travel the twenty-five miles or so to Sand Canyon, but when it arrived, the b
ig pipe held. By the following morning Owens Valley waters—about 3,000 inches, or an eighth of capacity—had passed through the siphons of the Jawbone Division, seventy-four miles farther along. By Friday night, traveling at about three and a half miles per hour, the water reached Mojave.

  Meantime, Mulholland drove from Sand Canyon up to Haiwee and took a spin on the recently formed “Lake Mulholland” there in the department’s new boat, then traveled back down the line, checking tunnels, siphons, and conduits for problems. The pipes had held, and Mulholland observed wryly that none of the tufa-added concrete had disintegrated when the water hit it. At least one other thing had been proved, he told a reporter: “The aqueduct does run downhill from the Owens Valley.”

  The correspondent noted that he had sampled the water at Mulholland’s invitation, both at the Haiwee Reservoir and out of a pipe in the Jawbone Division. He found it “good,” the reporter cabled. “No symptoms of alkali poison apparent. Hair not falling out. Owens River will be flowing down San Francisquito Canyon Saturday night.”

  It was something of an overstatement on the reporter’s part, for no water would be permitted to flow beyond the Fairmont Reservoir until the impoundment there was full, a process that took until October 1. From that reservoir, the waters were turned through the five-mile-long, ten-by-twelve-foot Elizabeth Tunnel, then shot out of the South Portal and down a fifty-foot fall to the bed of San Francisquito Creek, which it would use until the last of the conduits and power generating facilities in the canyon were completed. The flow was finally halted at Dry Canyon Dam about half way along the thirty-eight-mile stretch to the Cascade above the San Fernando Reservoir. There the waters would be held until released for the opening ceremonies, now set for November 5.

  Mulholland was already heartened by the fact that Mayor Rose had swung over to full support of the project, ousting water commissioner Graham from his position soon after he had taken office. The Public Service Commission had responded to the failure of the Graham bond issue with an essential endorsement of Mulholland’s long-held position—only those areas likely to be annexed by the city and capable of being economically served would be eligible to purchase excess water.

  In addition, Mulholland was also pleased by an unexpected discovery in the wake of the opening of the gates. The aqueduct was running at the rate of 25,000 inches, a quarter more than he had projected. For one thing, there was far less friction along the line than he had allowed for, and there was virtually no leakage to be found. If that rate of flow held, it would mean a considerable financial advantage to the city, for it meant that much more excess water could be sold.

  On October 30, details of the celebration planned to mark the aqueduct’s completion were published in Los Angeles papers, including elaborate festivities at the Cascade on Wednesday, November 5. “The big job is finished,” Mulholland told reporters. “Nothing remains now but to shoot off a few firecrackers, turn on the water and tackle the next big job.”

  It was perfect weather for the celebration on November 5, with the nighttime low rising from the mid-fifties to a pleasant seventy-two by midday. Somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 citizens turned out at the Cascade below the Newhall Pass to celebrate the arrival of water that had been promised to them for eight years—the building of a delivery system that had taken six of those years was now complete.

  For Mulholland, it was a day of mixed emotions. He was proud, of course, but he was also concerned about the health of his wife, Lillie, who had just undergone an operation for the uterine cancer she battled. His daughters, Rose and Lucile, sat with him on the reviewing stand built in the arid hills near the spillway gate and at one point during the ceremonies, word was passed to them that Lillie had, in the opinion of her doctors, pulled through the crisis.

  After various preliminaries, including a band concert, a military salute to the arriving dignitaries, and several introductory speeches by politicians and by his assistant J. B. Lippincott, the fifty-eight-year-old Mulholland rose to speak. His remarks were typical in their brevity. “The aqueduct is complete and it is good,” he said. “No one knows better than I how much we needed the water. We have the fertile lands and the climate. Only water was needed . . . and now we have it.”

  He was also characteristically generous in the kudos he gave Fred Eaton, who, still rankled by Mulholland’s opposition to his various attempts to sell land to the city, did not attend the ceremony. To the former mayor, Mulholland gave unequivocally “the honor of conceiving the plan of the aqueduct and of fostering it when it most needed assistance.”

  He concluded by saying, “On this crude platform is an altar to consummate the delivery of this valuable water supply and dedicate to you and posterity forever a magnificent body of water.” With that, Mulholland pulled on a lanyard that unfurled a big American flag above the platform, a signal that called forth a volley of cannon fire and aerial explosions. Higher up the hillside, General Adna Chaffee, Harvey Van Norman, and others began to turn the wheels that would unleash the water.

  It took two or three minutes, one reporter said, before anything happened, but “then the water came” in a flood that filled the concrete stair-steps of the Cascade more than two feet deep. The crowd, as reporters noted, “went wild with delight.” It took everything in the celebration chairman’s power to restore order so that Mulholland could go back to the podium to mark the formal conveyance of the aqueduct to the City of Los Angeles. Mulholland was not one to disappoint. He gazed out at the crowd and gestured toward the water. “There it is,” he said, delivering what was certainly the line of the day, perhaps his most memorable line of all. “Take it!”

  The celebration continued throughout the day and into the night. Mulholland and Lippincott were presented with silver loving cups by the Chamber of Commerce, and Mulholland, whose building project was touted as the equal of any ever undertaken, heard himself lauded as the “Goethals of the West,” after the chief engineer of the Panama Canal.

  At an evening banquet, the Southern California Association of Architects and Engineers gave Mulholland a parchment scroll of appreciation, emblazoned with a copy of the Roman aqueduct at Segovia, calling his achievement “stupendous,” and praising Lippincott and Fred Eaton as well. In his own typically brief acceptance speech, Mulholland thanked the original water board for their courage in backing the project to begin with and attorney William Mathews for managing the complex legal and financial affairs, adding the quip about Mathews keeping him free to work and out of jail. As to those who criticized the project along the way, Mulholland claimed that he had never paid much attention to the naysayers, knowing that when the water finally arrived, all would be forgotten.

  Kudos also came in from afar. C. A. Shaw, one of the three commissioners of New York City’s 163-mile-long Catskill Aqueduct, budgeted at $170 million, lauded the foresight of Los Angeles, calling it “one of the most provident cities in the work of securing a water supply that will last for decades.” Shaw pointed out that were the City of Los Angeles to have waited and been forced to condemn private property for the rights-of-way at some later point in time, the costs would have likely put the project forever out of reach.

  In all, the aqueduct was a more than 233-mile-long system: about 24 miles of open, unlined canal below the intake, and another 37 miles of lined, open canal leading to the Haiwee Reservoir; once the final conduit and tunnel work was completed in San Francisquito Canyon, there would be about 98 miles of covered conduit, nearly 43 miles of tunnels (some of them large enough to have driven trucks through), 12 miles of siphons, another 9 miles of tunnels used in the power generating systems, reservoirs totaling some 8 miles in length, and various flumes, bypasses, and outlet pipes. There were as many as 3,900 men working together on the project, alongside the 1,305 “hayburners” who endeared themselves to the Chief far more than the traction engines did.

  Mulholland had signed checks for as much as $575,000 in a single month (May 1913), but in the end, he had held expenditures withi
n $100,000 of the original $24.5 million, an accomplishment modern-day project superintendents might only dream of. In fact, as Mulholland pointed out in a report to the Board of Public Works, when one figured the value of the 125,000 acres of Owens Valley land owned by the city, the value of the cement plant and surrounding lands ($550,000), the value of surplus equipment, the value of the three power-generating plants in the valley, and the 755 mules he had purchased rather than leased, he had actually beaten the original estimate by about $3 million.

  Of the $24.6 million spent, just about half, or $12.5 million went to payroll, $8.15 million to materials and equipment, $2.25 million for freight, and just $1.7 million for lands and rights-of-way. Even presuming that the city kept its land holdings and power-generating plants in the Owens Valley, Mulholland estimated that the sale of the cement plant and surplus equipment would return $1 million to the city’s coffers.

  A reporter sent by the Times asked Mulholland if he was looking forward to a rest now that the great project was done. Mulholland thought about the question for a moment. “I took a vacation once, when the old board was giving me some trouble,” he said. “I told my secretary, I’m going to San Francisco. I don’t want a telephone call or a message. I’m going up there to rest and forget the aqueduct is on earth. I’ll be back in two or three weeks.”

  It was a Monday when he left, Mulholland recalled. On Wednesday morning he walked back into his office. One of his assistants glanced up in surprise. “I thought you were going to San Francisco for a rest,” the man said.