Rivers in the Desert

by Margaret L Davis

  In February 1928, Van Norman traveled north to Long Valley to make a final attempt at procuring a sale on behalf of the city. George Khurts, acting on behalf of Eaton, had confidentially wired Mathews at the Cosmos Club that if Mathews would tell him the price the Board of Water and Power Commissioners was willing to pay for Long Valley, he, Khurts, would talk the ailing Eaton into it if the price were “not too low.”

  Van Norman’s attempt was in vain. After months of effort, no agreement could be reached. Eaton stubbornly would not settle. Just as stubbornly, he managed to keep the embarrassment of his financial woes hidden from his friends and one-time admirers in Los Angeles. And for the time being, the intractable Fred Eaton disappeared as a topic of conversation in the offices of the Department of Water and Power.

  13

  Rivers of Hades

  Sudden destruction

  cometh upon them.

  1 THESS. 5:3

  ON MARCH 12, 1928, at four minutes before midnight, the world’s safest dam, the St. Francis, stood in all its technically perfect engineered glory. Mulholland personally christened its completion in the summer of 1926 without fanfare due to the prevailing troubles in the Owens Valley. It was hailed as one of the most impressive designs of its kind anywhere. Mulholland had been lauded for his construction genius in its design.

  At three minutes before midnight, the St. Francis Dam suddenly collapsed, spewing twelve billion gallons of water into the narrow San Francisquito Canyon at its base. At Powerhouse Number Two, one and a half miles down the canyon, engineer Ray Rising awoke to a deafening roar. He threw open the front door of his living quarters and stared in awe at a seventy-eight-foot wall of water crashing towards him. Rising yelled for his wife and three small children to run for their lives. Before they could escape, the water engulfed the concrete powerhouse and Rising’s adjoining cottage, collapsing the wood-frame house like a box of matchsticks and dragging it along in its chaotic path down the valley. The force of the deluge smashed the power plant into ten-thousand-ton pieces of concrete and carried them along on its wild ride.

  As the monstrous wave hit, Rising struggled to grip his wife’s arm, only to feel her slip away. Then he felt himself enveloped in blackness and choking with mud, his lungs filling with water. Tossing him on his back, and then head over heels, stripping his body of all clothing, the raging water propelled him down the valley. Then, miraculously, caught in the swirl of a freakish eddy, Rising managed to grab hold of a section of rooftop, pull himself up on it and ride it spread-eagled until it smashed up against a hillside and hurled him to safety. Through it all, he shouted in vain for his wife and children. Vomiting water and dazed, all he could do was helplessly watch as the ten-story wall of death rolled on.

  The raging head of black water, moving at eighteen miles an hour, now swept through Castaic Junction and boiled into the dry Santa Clara River bed, heading west. The water whipped through the small towns of Piru, Fillmore, Bardsdale, and within three hours flooded Santa Paula, forty-two miles south and seventeen hundred feet lower than the dam. The murderous wall of water now dwindled to twenty-five feet but it still splintered three hundred homes in Santa Paula’s southern section. The death and destruction continued, and swirled through the hamlet of Saticoy then across the Pacific Coast Highway ten miles west into the Pacific Ocean between Oxnard and Ventura.

  The torrent swept clean sixty-five miles of rich, fertile valley, engulfing automobiles, bridges, locomotives, everything in its path. One-hundred-ton blocks of concrete rode the water like rubber ducks. Ranch houses were crushed like eggshells, their cement foundations pulverized. Steel bridges were smashed like tin cans, and acres upon acres of citrus and nut trees were uprooted, their groves wiped clean of all vegetation. When it was over, parts of Ventura County lay under a seventy-foot-thick blanket of slimy debris.

  In Los Angeles, Van Norman was notified of the dam’s failure at 1:09 A.M. He immediately dressed and drove four miles in a light drizzle to Mulholland’s home. Van Norman walked up the wet slate porch steps to the front door, and rang the door bell. The household fights switched on, and Rose Mulholland pushed her head through an upstairs window as a neighborhood dog barked loudly at the intruder.

  “Van?” Rose asked, startled.

  “Rose,” he said quietly. “I must see the Chief.” Within minutes, William Mulholland appeared in the doorway, dressed in his pajamas, slippers and silk robe.

  White-faced, hat in hand, Van Norman looked at him for a long, painful moment.

  “What is it, son?” Mulholland asked.

  “The St. Francis is gone,” Van Norman said.

  Following Mulholland to his upstairs bedroom, Van Norman enumerated some of the known casualties. Rose quickly retrieved her father’s heavy work boots and field coat from the upstairs closet and brought them to him. Instead, Mulholland asked for the formal clothes he would wear to a funeral. Mulholland’s chauffeur was summoned and he and Van Norman were driven to the St. Francis at 2:30 A.M.

  The roads in the path of the floodwater had been washed out, and Mulholland’s driver was forced to steer the big black Cadillac up an unpaved fire trail to get to a viewing site east of the collapsed dam. Water to Mulholland was God’s gift to humanity, and he had lived his life in service of bringing it to the people of Los Angeles. Now he was about to witness its awful power of destruction. Standing silently on a rise, Mulholland and Van Norman gazed out at the scene below them. They could see in its entirety the huge span of the Santa Paula Railway bridge wedged in a muddy stream, broken and twisted, a tangled mass of spaghetti-like steel. As far as the eye could see, the flood waters had obliterated every shred of vegetation in the San Francisquito Canyon, leaving nothing but exposed granite rock and a moon-illuminated surface of mud holes. Dozens of shadowy clusters of ranchers were moving in the pre-dawn through flooded fields, attempting to remove human bodies and livestock buried in the silt and mud.

  Mulholland was overcome by grief, and Van Norman, fearing he might collapse, took his arm to steady him. The men made their way down a steep mountain slope through scrub brush where they could get a good look at the remains of the massive dam, and where they found department employees searching for missing workers. Every stick, stone and nail of the powerhouse, including its adjoining houses, had been demolished. All 74 residents of the dam, and 140 workers in a department camp downstream, had been lost.

  By dawn, Mulholland and Van Norman stood among fifteen hundred area residents who had survived the flood, some still bleeding and half-dressed, at a gathering on surrounding hilltops to watch in horror the last waters of the great deluge receding into a brownish gray swath of mud three miles wide. Amid pitiful, heart-wrenching cries of despair, slowly revealed in a hellish scene were hundreds of dead loved ones—fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and family pets, who were unable to escape the destruction, some of whom had been impaled by tree branches, others pinned between rocks and chunks of concrete.

  Their faces gray with fatigue, survivors hunted for the missing while others collected their dead. Men sloshed precariously through quicksand-like muck, carrying makeshift stretchers and portable camp kitchens to aid and feed survivors stranded and shivering on small shoals in the middle of still-turbulent streams.

  Few had any chance at all. Trapped below the steep canyon walls, the victims could only run a short distance before they were overtaken. Those who had paused to grab shoes or coats had been immediately swept away. Like Ray Rising, only miracles saved those who survived.

  In many places the mud was fifteen feet or more thick, hindering the search, and a foul stench permeated the entire valley. Armies of volunteers arriving on the scene methodically fanned out over a distance of twenty miles, searching every crevice and beneath every boulder, poking long sticks into the mud, prodding for bodies. Rescuers then marked the locations of corpses with iron markers pounded into the mud. The work was gruesome and disheartening. Some bodies were so battered by the awesome for
ce of the water that identification was impossible.

  Teams of pack horses and mules from nearby ranches were used to drag the silt-covered bodies to dry land. Ambulances arrived in Newhall, and a makeshift morgue was established in the town’s dance hall where bright decorations still adorned the interior from the previous festive Saturday night. By noon, undertakers could not cope with the mounting number of corpses, and fifty mud-caked bodies lay in rows on pine boards, piled like cord wood, and cleansed with garden hoses for purposes of identification.

  Otto Steen, leader of a ten-member rescue team from the Department of Water and Power, himself located twenty-two more bodies near the shattered dam. Later, moving downstream, he heard a cry for help. It was Ray Rising, huddled naked in the scrub brush, cradling a matted sheep dog. They carried the exhausted Rising three miles to a Red Cross camp, the mud-covered sheep dog treading miserably behind, wagging his tail.

  Families searched in vain while numbers of their dead grew—one hundred, two hundred, three hundred. They roamed the makeshift morgues and school gymnasiums throughout the area of devastation, searching for their loved ones. Forty-two children—half the enrollment of the small Saugus Elementary School—were dead. Some feared the death toll could reach as many as six hundred—many of the bodies had been washed into the ocean, and many missing Mexican migrant farm workers could never be fully counted.

  Six hundred vehicles from the Los Angeles sheriff’s and police departments and the California State Patrol descended into the flood zone. Their bright uniforms quickly turned a drab, muddy olive as they searched through the muck. Red Cross ladies set up camp kitchens and sleeping cots, brewed giant pots of steaming coffee and loaded hundreds of sandwiches into steel bins.

  Fifty tractors followed by squads of recruited laborers moved down the Santa Clara Valley toward the Pacific Ocean in a frantic search for more survivors. At night, a reddish glare of gloom hung over the Santa Clara Valley as workmen set fire to huge piles of refuse. Like a somber funeral dirge, the hum of the tractors muffled the blows of axes and picks as workers continued the grisly search. An appeal for fifty more tractors was broadcast by Los Angeles radio stations, and volunteers were told to mobilize at what used to be a half-million-dollar showplace and tourist attraction, the ranch near Castaic of movie actor Harry Carey, now wiped clean.

  Witnesses recounted to reporters freakish scenes of survival—a nude man seen floating on an empty wardrobe trunk, a woman riding the top of a city water tank in an evening dress—a mother and her three infants gratefully clinging to an old featherbed mattress miraculously lodged in a tree.

  Tent cities were quickly erected in the flood zone. In Santa Paula, where the flood waters had reached as high as the second floor of the high school, fourteen houses were seen randomly floating like sticks of straw over the inundated Isabel school grounds. Twenty blocks of Santa Paula houses were destroyed. The hundreds of somber, mud encrusted searchers and workers streamed through the makeshift camps seeking shelter, clothing, and news about the missing.

  On a hillside near the Carey Ranch, a pathetic figure of a woman sat huddled only in a tattered, red, water-stained cotton sweater, wringing her hands, sobbing over her missing little daughter, her home now nothing but a mud hole, and the cottonwood trees stripped of bark by the scouring waters. Deputy sheriffs approached her from an islet in the receding waters, carrying the body of her three-year-old child. Over her nightgown, the child had a Sunday best coat and on her feet her mother’s shoes with the strings untied, mute testimony to the frantic effort the mother had made to save her. Behind the sheriffs walked two brawny, hip-booted ranchers in tears, carrying the remains of two other children.

  At the Santa Paula Hospital, overflowing with victims, another mother, Mrs. Ann Holsclaw, wept as she explained how the flood current washed her home away and threw her to safety while simultaneously ripping her baby from her arms. “Johnny was sleeping with me,” she sobbed. “I clutched him as tight as I could when the water swept us out in the dark. I grabbed hold of something. With my other arm I held the baby out of the water best I could, then I couldn’t hold on any longer. Why was I the one who had to live?” she asked plaintively.

  RECOVERING FROM THE initial sight of the immense human tragedy the flood had wrought, Mulholland and Van Norman joined in with the rescuers to aid them. Grief-stricken and fatigued, Mulholland returned to the offices of the Department of Water and Power eighteen hours later. His immediate concern now was to secure the city’s water supply, and he ordered breaks in the aqueduct system caused by the dam failure to be repaired. Telephone linemen worked feverishly to restore communications to the devastated area while Department of Water and Power crews began to secure the broken aqueduct pipes, assisting where they could in the rescue of survivors.

  At Mulholland’s order, conscripted air mail pilots began an immediate air survey of the entire area from the Santa Clara Valley to the Pacific Ocean. At dusk Mulholland received the overwhelming details. “It’s a scene of horror, Colonel,” reported the weary voice of one of the pilots over the telephone.

  “It is just one great scene of devastation … some places a half-mile wide, and at other places a mile and a half. It stretches clear to the sea. Thousands of people and automobiles are slushing through the mud and debris looking for the dead. Bodies have been washed into the isolated canyons. I saw one alive stuck in the mud to his neck.”

  The pilot continued with a grim prediction that he personally felt further rescue work would prove fruitless until sunrise as a dark, moonless night was anticipated. To attempt to rescue survivors trapped in the treacherous mud at night would only cause the death of the rescuers, and the bodies of the already dead, human and animal, would eventually be recovered in the huge mounds of tangled debris that had swept down and was now piling up at the ocean.

  Desperately Mulholland desired to continue the search despite the advice that it would be fruitless and dangerous, and was about to proceed when Van Norman convinced him of the hopelessness of the attempt. For what seemed an eternity to Van Norman, Mulholland, defeated, sat down heavily in his desk chair and covered his face with his hands. Van Norman knew that for all his past glory and power and fame, his Chief, the conqueror of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and builder of mighty dams, the friend of governors and presidents, could do nothing but wait until dawn. And by dawn’s first light, the state militia, the state police, and later the United States government, backed by three thousand volunteers, were beginning to arrive to search for the still-living under Mulholland’s adamant direction.

  While the search for human victims continued, the thousands of animals that perished in the flood caused serious health concerns for officials. Fearing an outbreak of typhoid, officers ordered human survivors inoculated with typhoid serum, and insisted on the cremation of all animal remains. Scores of marooned domestic fowl had to be removed from debris and trees to areas where they could forage for themselves. It was also necessary to slaughter thousands of hogs and other livestock because of the impossibility of transporting them through the treacherous mud. Those that were saved were enclosed by barbed wire fences to contain them. The barbed wire proved to be a source of injury, maiming many of the panicked animals as they attempted to flee. There was no choice but to kill the suffering animals.

  News of the tragedy had now reached the nation. People who had never heard of the Santa Clara Valley now found their attention riveted on radio and newspaper accounts of the dam’s collapse and the ongoing rescue efforts. The Los Angeles Evening Express was the first newspaper to publish the gory photographs of the disaster. Photo plates had been rushed by automobile after newspaper photographers invaded the disaster area. “Corpses Flung in Muddy Chaos by Tide of Doom” read the morning headline over the heartbreaking photographs. The next morning editors typeset a new slant for an eager and morbid audience: “Desolation Stalks Where Fertile Fields Once Held Happy Homes Now Hurled Into Oblivion” printed above photographs of mud-blanketed farms.
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  Seeking to view the carnage firsthand, thousands of curiosity seekers descended in droves. By the weekend twenty-five thousand cars descended into what was left of the town of Santa Paula, and all major thoroughfares in the San Fernando Valley were shut down in the biggest traffic jam in its history. Newspaper and radio please urged motorists to stay away, which perversely excited their curiosity even more. Angry ranchers forced the curious and unruly mobs back with loaded shotguns. Police were issued orders to shoot looters on sight.

  In the great flood’s aftermath, debris, bodies, and pieces of dam were found washed up on the beaches of San Diego, two hundred miles south. The headless body of another victim was found in the river bottom near Santa Paula. Because of the battered condition of the torso, the Ventura coroner was unable to determine whether the victim had been a man or a woman.

  The flood had cut a two-mile-wide path, stretching seventy miles from Santa Clara to the Pacific Ocean. At least 450 people were known dead, 1200 homes were destroyed and 8000 acres of farmland stripped clean. Damage estimates were reported at $15 million.

  FIVE DAYS AFTER THE FLOOD, Rose Mulholland opened a letter addressed to her father written by Anna Holsclaw of Santa Paula.

  Dear Sir,

  Will you please read this letter thoroughly as it comes straight from the heart of a broken hearted and distracted mother who, through the St. Francis dam disaster has lost everything on earth including two darling children, one little girl twelve-years-old whose body we have recovered, but our darling baby’s body six-months-old we have never found.…