Floodpath
Page 5
L.A.’s surreptitious strategy not only gave the city primary access to the Owens Valley watershed, it posed an obstacle to irrigation plans being considered by the U.S. Reclamation Service. When it came time for Eaton to transfer his options to city control, Mulholland and City Attorney W.B. Mathews balked at their old friend’s idea of a public-private partnership. Mathews made it clear that the United States government would never sanction such an arrangement. Eaton reluctantly agreed to make the aqueduct a publicly owned enterprise, but he retained ownership of Long Valley. The pieces of a secret deal were falling into place. Only a few missing parts remained when L.A.’s cover was blown.
On July 29, 1905, Angelenos awoke to stunning news. A huge headline in the Los Angeles Times blared, TITANIC PROJECT TO GIVE CITY A RIVER. Harrison Gray Otis had broken the press embargo. Eaton and Mulholland’s Owens Valley scheme was abruptly in the open. With all doubts gone, Owens Valley residents were furious to learn they’d been hornswoggled. Even if farmers and ranchers considered some of the land they sold as worthless, if they’d known the truth, they could have demanded more for it. Unlike the jubilation in the Times, a newspaper in the Valley was bitterly somber: LOS ANGELES PLOTS DESTRUCTION, WOULD TAKE OWENS RIVER, LAY LANDS WASTE, RUIN PEOPLE, HOMES AND COMMUNITIES. It read like a declaration of war. It was.
William Randolph Hearst, the media magnate and U.S. congressman from New York, was owner-publisher of the Los Angeles Examiner, a newly arrived Times competitor. Otis’s premature scoop enraged Hearst. After the press embargo was broken, Hearst and the small left-leaning L.A. press pounced. Investigative reporters exposed the General’s “timely” investments in the San Fernando Valley. Always looking for sensational headlines, the Examiner featured articles exposing purported leaks in earthen dams that supported L.A.’s existing reservoirs, arguing that the city was unqualified to take on such a monumental engineering challenge.
With accusations flying, L.A. leaders rushed to get voter approval for a $1.5 million bond issue to purchase the land and water rights Fred Eaton had obtained on the city’s behalf. The citizens of Los Angeles needed to be sold on the plan. While Harrison Gray Otis and other L.A. boosters beat the drum, the Chief spoke with characteristic bluntness: “If Los Angeles doesn’t get the water, she won’t need it.” The choice was to grow or stagnate. In a last-minute change of heart, William Randolph Hearst added his support. He remained a foe of Harrison Gray Otis, but Hearst had presidential ambitions. Los Angeles had a growing number of voters. When water came, there would be more.
On September 5, 1905, during a sweltering heat wave, the L.A. electorate, enthusiastic about the promise of more water and the benefits growth could bring, voted yes by a fourteen-to-one margin. Mulholland was giddy. “I’m intoxicated—drunk with delight. I’d like to whoop and yell like a kid.”35
The Chief’s triumphant hollers didn’t deter angry Owens Valley activists. Only one man could settle the growing conflict. Mulholland and Mathews, accompanied by influential California Senator Frank Flint, traveled to Washington to meet with President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the U.S. Forest Service chief, another Progressive who was eager to maximize access and use of public land. On June 25, 1906, after listening to what the L.A. contingent had to say, Roosevelt wrote a letter: “It is a hundred or a thousandfold more important to state that this [water] is more valuable to the people as a whole if used by the city than if used by the people of the Owens Valley.”36
In international affairs, there were imperialist ambitions in Teddy Roosevelt’s vision for America’s future. In a way, his judgment to side with Los Angeles in the battle over control of Owens Valley water resources expresses a new kind of urban imperialism, in contrast to the localized vision of an older, smaller, rural America. At the same time, it was a utilitarian Progressive’s “greatest good for the greatest number” decision, even though those not included in “the greatest number” considered it overbearing and unfair.
As a trust-busting champion combating the great concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a Gilded Age minority, including utility syndicates, Roosevelt also was swayed by evidence that some of the opposition to the aqueduct originated from “certain private power companies whose object evidently is for their own pecuniary interest to prevent the municipality from furnishing its own water.”37 By the spring of 1906, it looked as if Los Angeles was going to get a man-made river.
Nature had another agenda. At 5:12 A.M. on April 18, the ground beneath San Francisco abruptly shifted. Twenty seconds later, a second jolt hit. Shaking seemed to last for minutes. Buildings shuddered, slipped on their foundations, and collapsed. Gas lines and water mains burst. Fires broke out, and there wasn’t enough water pressure to extinguish them.
Considered an “Act of God,” exacerbated by human city building, the San Francisco earthquake, a product of the infamous San Andreas Fault, was the worst natural disaster in California history. Tremors were felt as far as Los Angeles. Measurements at the time were far from precise, but it was well known that California rested on a creeping patchwork of tectonic plates. The planned route for the Owens River Aqueduct paralleled and even crossed the San Andreas and other earthquake faults. Some were considered “dead,” or inactive, but there was concern that a major tremor could sever L.A.’s proposed pipeline, or even bring down dams associated with it. Fortunately, in San Francisco local dams survived intact.
Mulholland traveled north and surveyed what the shaker had done to the San Francisco water system.38 After his return, with his usual unflappable self-confidence, the Chief assured uneasy L.A. officials that large structures like dams don’t come down easily, and since water systems, including aqueducts, are often below the surface, they are less susceptible to aboveground shaking.39 As usual, anxious city leaders took Mulholland at his word. It was a message they wanted to hear. Planning for the Owens River Aqueduct continued.
By 1907, thanks to Fred Eaton’s undercover efforts, Los Angeles had acquired the land and water rights it needed, but a $24 million bond issue remained to be approved to pay for construction. After another contentious campaign, with the Los Angeles Times and city boosters arguing the immediate need for more water, and much of the opposition orchestrated by private utility interests, on June 12 Angeleno voters again said yes.
The political battles were hardly over, but William Mulholland was eager to get to work. From the books he’d read in his riverside shack thirty years before, and many others later, he undoubtedly knew that the longest Roman aqueduct, a wonder of the ancient world, was fifty-nine miles long. In 1907, New York City boasted about plans for the new Catskill Aqueduct, which would extend for 163 miles. The idea of a 233-mile-long equivalent was a fevered pipe dream to some; a feat only a well-qualified engineer could design, let alone accomplish. As an indication of professional respect for Mulholland and the project he was about to undertake, on February 6, 1907, at age fifty-one, the self-educated Irishman received a diploma from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
After studying Mulholland’s plans on paper and in the field, a prominent panel of engineering consultants recommended changes in the Chief’s design, mostly to save money. The consultants’ final report was released on December 25, 1906. Overall, it was a Christmas present for the Chief. “We find the project admirable in conception and outline,” the evaluation concluded, “and full of promise for the continued prosperity of Los Angeles.”40 Toting the costs, including changes, the independent engineers figured the job could be completed for $25.5 million, a little above the Chief’s estimate of $23 million. Adding more encouragement, following a national trend that encouraged development of water resources for more than one purpose, the consultants recommended including hydroelectric power generation in the system, noting that profits from selling electricity might pay for the whole thing. Providing specifics, the panel suggested routing the Aqueduct to a location where falling water could best generate electricity—the steep terrain of San Francisquito Canyo
n.
Not everyone greeted this as good news. Private power companies, facing the prospect of publicly owned competition, were not pleased. Along with angry residents of the Owens Valley, the Edison Company was uncomfortably on the same side with Los Angeles Socialists. The Chief had his admirers, but he aroused implacable detractors as well. Anger, controversy, and even violence would accompany William Mulholland every mile of the Owens River Aqueduct, and continue until the day the floodwaters from the St. Francis Dam surged from the night and overwhelmed his career.
3.
“There It Is, Take It!”
In a way, the St. Francis floodpath begins with the intake of the Owens River Aqueduct, hundreds of miles north of the dam site, and dates from a time more than twenty years before midnight on March 12, 1928. By October 1908, work on Mulholland’s unprecedented water-delivery system was officially under way. Ahead were engineering challenges and a forbidding natural environment. In the summer, temperatures in the California desert regularly topped 100 degrees and soared as high as 120. In winter, freezing conditions were common.
To make this Súper Zanja Madre possible, 1,500 miles of terrain were surveyed to discover a route where gravity alone could propel the flow. To facilitate and support construction, a new transportation infrastructure was needed. Rail lines extending for 130 miles, along with 505 miles of roads and trails, had to be scraped and carved across the desert. Ironically, providing water for the workforce was among the most difficult challenges. A separate 269-mile pipeline was laid, paralleling the Aqueduct with feeder lines, storage tanks, and small reservoirs. Wherever available, local streams and wells were tapped.
Two generating plants supplied electricity, with 218 miles of transmission lines and 377 miles of telephone and telegraph connections linking administrative offices in L.A. to construction sites. Permanent and temporary settlements were built to house workers and supervisory staff, complete with tents, cottages, offices, shops, mess halls, and medical facilities.1 Following close behind, but not included in Mulholland’s budget, independent entrepreneurs supplied “entertainment,” including games of chance and a traveling coterie of hospitable young ladies.
The 233-mile-long work site was under the administrative supervision of the Los Angeles City Council and the city’s Board of Public Works, but ultimately Bill Mulholland was in charge of getting the job done—on time and on or under budget. At the time, it was a construction challenge compared to the Panama Canal.
As always, the Chief focused on efficiency and the bottom line. After evaluating bids from independent contractors, he decided the Los Angeles Water Department could do the job just as well, if not better, and certainly at lower cost. The Aqueduct attracted an itinerant workforce, including some from around the world. At the peak of the effort, 3,900 men were on the job. Hours were long and conditions isolated and inhospitable. Workers were hired as city employees and the average salary was $2.50 a day. In the budget, the use of “in-house” personnel was called “force account.” Force account workers gave Mulholland greater managerial control and cut labor costs by as much as 20 percent.2 It was a system the Chief preferred for the rest of his career. City political leaders, businessmen, and taxpayers admired and supported Mulholland’s commitment to cut costs. Such a tightfisted attitude was especially valuable in the early years of the 1900s, when the U.S. economy was in turmoil. Undeterred by fund-raising difficulties, the Chief told a reporter “I’m going into this as a man in the army goes into war because it would be cowardly to quit.”3
Mulholland always was more comfortable in the field than behind a desk. Work along the northern section of the Aqueduct was hard, but the jagged, sometimes snow-capped Sierra, featuring craggy Mt. Whitney, at the time the highest peak in the United States, provided an awe-inspiring backdrop. Mulholland admired the beauties of California and knew them well, but to his generation of engineers, the natural environment was a raw resource to be tamed and harnessed. “Nature is the squarest fighter there is,” he said, “and I wanted the fight.”4
Harrison Gray Otis relished that kind of militant bravura. Mulholland shared little else with the Times boss, and claimed to have met the General only a couple of times, but Otis and his cohorts looked forward to the growth and profits the Aqueduct would bring, and the blustery newspaper publisher made sure his readers knew what kind of man was out there in the wilderness, building L.A.’s future. Along with the public relations efforts of the Los Angeles Water Department, the General enhanced Mulholland’s reputation as a visionary self-taught engineer and dedicated and determined public servant, while diverting attention from the more self-serving pursuits of the city’s profit-minded oligarchy.
The Chief appeared to brush aside celebrity, but he took pride in his role as a provider and caretaker of the liquid assets Los Angeles needed to grow, and aggressively resisted anyone who challenged his efforts to get more, an attitude that influenced the fate of the St. Francis Dam.
The top men under Bill Mulholland’s command were comrades-in-arms, willing to work hard for what the boss thought was best. Many remained his allies all his life. On the Aqueduct, chief among them was J.B. Lippincott. After revelations of his role as an advocate for Los Angeles while he also worked for the U.S. Reclamation Service, Lippincott decided to leave the Service and take a lucrative job with his old friend as assistant chief engineer on the Owens Valley project.5
Along with longtime associates, the Chief enjoyed mentoring younger engineers. Twenty-nine-year-old, six-foot-five Texan Harvey Van Norman was self-taught like his boss. A hardworking and skilled manager, “Van” was as easygoing as the Chief could be brusque. In the years to come, the two men developed an almost father-son relationship.
Studious thirty-six-year-old Ezra Scattergood, another new hire, had engineering degrees from Rutgers, Cornell, and the Georgia School of Technology. Mulholland recruited Scattergood after it was decided to add hydroelectric power to the Owens Valley project. Scattergood’s first job was to get two small generating plants into operation, providing power to work camps and construction machinery.
The Aqueduct route, as planned by Mulholland and his team with input from the panel of consulting engineers, ran a gradual downhill course, with a few thrill rides along the way. Originating fifteen miles north of the Inyo County town of Independence, the 233-mile-long journey started slowly, bypassing shallow Owens Lake with nearly sixty-one miles of mostly open channel. To maintain a downhill track, the Aqueduct was suspended as high as possible on hillsides, gradually descending sixty-five feet toward Haiwee Reservoir, soon to be the largest lake in California, where as much as twenty-one million gallons could be stored.
After passing through Haiwee, the Aqueduct continued in an underground channel across barren terrain for another twenty miles. The fun began when four steep canyons were encountered: Nine-mile, No Name, Sand, and Grapevine. To keep the flow going, “reverse siphons,” more accurately described as “sag pipes,” were used.
Traditional siphons had n shapes to carry fluids up from one level to another. The sag pipes used along the route of the Owens River Aqueduct were designed as u shapes. They looked like giant elbow joints made from riveted steel, with the elbow resting at the bottom of a steep canyon. When water rushed down inside the “bicep” of the joint, gravity pulled the flow down through the elbow. Lower pressure inside the empty “forearm” of the sag pipe allowed the water to continue to move up and over the opposite canyon wall, all without the expense of pumps.
Twenty-three sag pipes were essential to Mulholland’s gravity-powered plan. The most impressive, which employed the greatest use of gravity and varying hydraulic pressure, was constructed 130 miles south of the intake, where the Aqueduct tapped the Owens River. Over eight thousand feet long, it spanned a gaping chasm aptly named Jawbone Canyon.
After riding the Jawbone roller coaster, the Aqueduct traveled twenty-eight miles in a covered conduit across the forbidding Mojave Desert until it entered the flatlands of the
Antelope Valley. Here, the system’s longest sag pipe was constructed. Following a gentle dip in the valley floor, a steel-and-concrete conduit, rested on concrete supports, extended nearly four and a half miles.
The Jawbone Canyon sag pipe, looking south (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)
The steel used in sag pipes and other sections of the Owens River Aqueduct was expensive and important, but concrete was an even more essential building material. More than 1.25 million barrels of concrete were used to line canals, form conduits, surface reservoirs, construct control gates, and provide occasional foundational support for earthen dams.
When work began, Mulholland requested bids from private concrete manufacturers, but when they came in high, he followed a suggestion from J.B. Lippincott and decided to build a city-owned mill. Located near the town of Tehachapi, 110 miles north of Los Angeles, a new community called Aqueduct was founded in 1908. In 1910, the outpost was renamed Monolith, after nearby limestone monolith deposits. Heated limestone is an important component of Portland cement, a scientifically formulated mix developed in England in the 1820s. Because cement was considered generally impervious to water, it was commonly used in waterworks, harbors and aqueducts.
Cement production in the city’s Monolith mill was not only cheaper: so were transportation costs after a short rail spur was constructed near the desert town of Mojave. Again, Mulholland’s economizing saved the city money, but didn’t please private cement manufacturers and suppliers. Adding to their irritation, following another suggestion from Assistant Engineer Lippincott, the Chief decided to save even more by setting up two mills to produce “blended cement,” a mix of Portland cement combined with tufa, a kind of volcanic rock that was common in the area. Tufa cement took longer to dry or set, but it was said to be stronger and last longer. The Romans used tufa in their ancient water systems. That was good enough for Bill Mulholland.