by Jon Wilkman
Lyman and Lillian’s neighbors were Ray Rising and his wife, Julia. The three Rising daughters—twenty-two months, five, and seven years old—played with the Curtis kids. Nearby, Homer Coe occupied a temporary cabin. On March 12, Coe’s wife, Nora, an off-duty city employee who lived in Los Angeles, was staying with him.
Lyman and Lillian Curtis’s children: from left to right, Mazie, Daniel, and Marjorie (Ivan Dorsett)
In the row of cottages that paralleled the San Francisquito Creek bed, Carl Mathews lived with his French-born wife, Amelia, their three sons, and an adopted daughter. On March 12, Mathews’s niece, Vida, was a visitor. An expert cabinetmaker, Carl enjoyed making furniture for his fellow workers. “A gift,” the Water and Power Department employee magazine reported, “that would bring a smile to the face of a new bride, or an expectant mother, and a hearty handshake from his male friends.”25
Carl’s brother D.C. (Dave) also was a BPL employee. In response to Harvey Van Norman’s orders, Dave worked with Ray Rising and Homer Coe to close the Aqueduct adit. The men dropped large logs into a slot to block the way, then opened the reservoir water-release gates. At the end of his shift, Mathews planned to drive to Newhall, where he lived. His brother Carl, who had a house in the canyon, was scheduled to go on duty at eleven P.M., a time when electrical demand from distant Los Angeles was low, and only one turbine was kept running. That gave him time to work on his cabinetry projects.
On March 12, 1928, night came early to San Francisquito Canyon. As the sun dropped behind the steep canyon walls, scattered clouds slid slowly across a rising moon. Around 7:30 P.M., thirty-seven-year-old nurse Katherine Spann, who was in charge of the hospital at Powerhouse 1 at the far end of the St. Francis Reservoir, decided to go for a ride to Newhall to get gas for her car and check the tires. Her friend, rigger Helmer Steen, joined her. On the way, the couple stopped at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Harley Berry. Berry, a chief mechanic, had worked for the Bureau of Power and Light since 1920. Only hours before, he supervised the closing of the Aqueduct adit and the opening of the reservoir release gates. Berry lived with his wife, Oramae, in one of the four furnished cottages a short distance below Powerhouse 2.
The Berrys were listening to the radio when Spann and Steen arrived. Mr. Berry was especially happy to see them. He had bumped his head and wanted Nurse Spann to take a look. After some friendly conversation, with no mention of the St. Francis Dam, around nine P.M. Mrs. Berry asked to come along on the trip to Newhall. When they returned, the chief operator’s wife asked if the two visitors would like to stay for some coffee and sandwiches. Steen checked his watch. It was 11:30. They had to get back. It was dark and they needed to drive carefully.
Continuing on the narrow dirt road, Spann and Steen approached Powerhouse 2. “I saw several men coming out of the powerhouse,” the nurse remembered, “evidently going off duty, and the lights were all lit. It was very quiet.” She also noticed that there was nothing unusual about the amount of water in the canal that led away from the St. Francis Dam.
In the powerhouse basement, Carl Mathews was probably preparing to work on a dining-room chair he was making to please friends. As Spann and Steen drove deeper into the San Francisquito Canyon, something felt different. Spann turned to her companion: “It is quite spooky tonight, terribly quiet, no cars in sight, no air, breeze or anything, unusually quiet.”26 The road led them thirteen feet above the eastern crest of the St. Francis Dam, and north along the reservoir. It was close to midnight when they pulled to a stop at Powerhouse 1. During the trip, Spann and Steen hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual, and hadn’t noticed two vehicles traveling at a distance behind them.
Warehouseman Dean Keagy lived in Los Angeles. On the night of March 12 he was on his way to work, driving his 1923 Ford coupe at thirty-five miles an hour on the road to Powerhouse 1. He encountered only one other car. It was coming in the other direction. Around 11:30, Keagy passed the St. Francis Dam. Although there were no lights on the massive structure, the white concrete stood out in the darkness. The warehouseman did notice one light, though, on the canyon floor. It appeared to be “in a sort of a camp.” He encountered no other signs of life, “unless they were hiding behind bushes or like that.”27
Like Dean Keagy, twenty-eight-year-old Bureau of Power and Light carpenter Ace Hopewell lived in Los Angeles. On his way to Powerhouse 1, Hopewell was riding his motorcycle, which was equipped with a sidecar. In Saugus, he stopped for coffee before continuing into San Francisquito Canyon. He was traveling slower than usual. He admitted, “I can make sixty miles an hour in the open, but a car can beat me on that road.” Riding along the canyon floor, as he turned his handlebars the motorcycle headlight revealed the shallow stream in the canal beside him.
The night was dark and cold as Hopewell followed the road up the hillside toward the east side of the St. Francis Dam. Nothing looked out of place when he slowly drove past and continued on. After about a mile and a half, he decided to stop for a cigarette. It was then something caught his attention—a sound from behind. “I heard a rumbling noise. At least I thought I did … I was positive that I heard a rumbling noise.” He thought it might be rocks rolling down the hill. The road above the dam could be treacherous. Earlier that night, one traveler reported that he had to slow his car to pass over a twelve-inch drop in the dirt surface.28 Ahead, Hopewell could see lights from two cars “considerably in the lead of me.” Hearing nothing more, he tossed aside his cigarette, revved his bike, and rode on.29
BPL operator Henry Silvey, often known by his nickname, Ray, lived in the Powerhouse 1 community with his wife and children. Monday, March 12, was his day off. Around 9:25 P.M., he returned from a visit to Santa Paula with his family and went to work on the night shift. In Powerhouse 2, below the St. Francis Dam, Lou Burns also was on the job. An eight-year BPL veteran, Burns worked as an electrician on the Aqueduct. Over the phone, the two men joshed about Silvey’s off-time activities. As part of a regular routine, they compared water levels in the Powerhouse 1 and 2 surge chambers. Agreeing to make any adjustments at midnight, the two ended the call and hung up.30
On the powerhouse floor, relief operator H.L. Tate kept an eye on electrical output levels, while Ray Silvey was upstairs on the control board. Around 11:57 and thirty seconds, Tate noticed a brief unexpected fluctuation and recorded it in the operation logbook. “We got what we call a nibble or fish bite,” he remembered. At first “everything was clear and there was no indication of trouble.” Then, at 12:02 and thirty seconds, “It went down in a heap … everything went black … Power all gone.”31
The Powerhouse 2 Control Board (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)
Fifty miles away in Los Angeles, electricity cut out and flickered back. Most Angelenos didn’t notice. They were asleep. So were residents of San Francisquito Canyon and the Santa Clara River Valley. The night crew at the Southern California Edison Saugus substation, ten miles below the St. Francis Dam, didn’t need a wake-up call. They were startled into action when an oil switch exploded, setting off a fire. Frank Thees could see it from the bedroom window of his cabin. “With all haste I got up and put on my shoes and pants, grabbed up a heavy lumberjack coat and ran for the rack. Arriving there I helped the station crew fighting the fire.”32 Something had gone terribly wrong and no one was sure what caused it. In Powerhouse 1, above the St. Francis Dam, Ray Silvey also had unanswered questions. As soon as power went down, he attempted to call his friend Lou Burns in Powerhouse 2. There was no answer. The telephone line was dead.
A few minutes before, in a San Francisquito Canyon bungalow below the St. Francis Dam, Ray Rising awakened to what he thought was a tornado. During his Minnesota boyhood he heard that sound before. This seemed more menacing. Rising’s house was shaking as he opened the front door. Before he could blink, a wall of water lunged from the darkness, crushed his house “like an eggshell,” and swallowed him whole. Caught in an uprooted oak tree and a tangle of electrical wires, Rising was “swimming in
blackness” and fighting for his life. The flood deafened shouts to his wife and children. Just as he thought he was about to die, a floating rooftop appeared from nowhere. Rising held on until the raft of debris crashed into a hillside and he was able to crawl to safety.
Powerhouse 2 survivor Ray Rising, pictured before the flood (Carol Rising Longo)
Ray Rising’s neighbors were Lyman and Lillian Curtis and their three children. Lillian also heard the approaching roar and believed it was a thunderstorm. Her first thought was to retrieve clothes she’d left to dry on the line. Outside, a strange mist was in the air. Suddenly she knew. “The dam has broke!” she shouted.33 Her husband told her to get their three-year-old son, Danny, from his crib and to “run up the hill” behind their cottage. He would save the two young daughters. Outside, barefoot and in her bedclothes, Lillian pushed through waist-deep water. Her son had slipped from her arms and was crawling up the hillside. The boy called back: “Mommy, come on! Don’t let that water get us!” Just as she was about to give up, somehow Lillian found higher ground.34 Looking down, she could see a “great black wall” rolling past.35 Only then did she hear the family dog barking a few feet away. Holding her son tight, Lillian pulled the spotted shepherd close for warmth as the roar faded downstream.
Rumbling along at eighteen miles per hour, the towering deluge, as much as 140 feet high, hit Powerhouse 2. On the hillside, E.H. Thomas’s house was shaking violently. The doors and windows rattled. The lights blinked and went out. Thomas thought it was an earthquake. It took time to calm his mother and get dressed to see what had happened. Climbing down the hillside, he looked below. The sixty-one-foot-high powerhouse, built with concrete and reinforced steel, was gone—wiped off the canyon floor. Only the two black turbines remained. Thomas shined a flashlight on his wristwatch. The time was 12:15 A.M. Below, he could see scour marks where the flood tide had already receded twenty feet after the first surge. On the canyon floor, there was only mud and debris where the employee cottages once stood, and no sign of the families who lived there. “Everything went with the first rush of water,” he remembered.36
Events were engulfed in confusion and memories would become matters of debate. Back in Powerhouse 1, Ray Silvey and relief operator H.L Tate remembered alerting Chief Operator Oscar Spainhower and Martin Lindstrum, a patrolman responsible for monitoring local power lines. Since phone service was dead, they used a newly installed radio communication system to try to establish a connection to the Los Angeles headquarters of the Bureau of Power and Light.
Downstream, the floodwaters escaped the narrowest section of San Francisquito Canyon, slamming against hillsides and overwhelming everything in the way. Ahead was the Raggio ranch. In minutes, all traces of the family’s historic house, barns, vineyard, and garden were obliterated. Only one building, situated on higher ground, was left. Fortunately, Frank Raggio, his wife, and his seven children were staying in their Los Angeles home that night. Three ranch hands somehow survived with only wounds from barbed wire.37 The Ruiz ranch, next in the floodpath, was less fortunate. Eight Ruiz family members and relatives were swept to their deaths. After the torrent passed, only a single eucalyptus tree remained. On the hillside above the homestead, the family cemetery was spared.
Remembering what the leaks in the St. Francis Dam looked like and Assistant Dam Keeper Jack Ely’s grim joke about the structure’s perilous condition, San Francisquito rancher Chester Smith was uneasy when he went to bed on the night of March 12. Smith’s ranch was about three miles below the dam. He decided to sleep in the barn with the sliding doors open. Sometime after midnight, the barking of the ranch dog woke him up. He could hear something coming, and the sound was terrifying. “I could hear trees breaking, and could hear … the wires on the electrical poles going,” he remembered. Smith had been in a flood before. Horrified, he realized what was coming.
Without taking time to dress, Smith shouted to Hugh Nichols, his brother-in-law, and Nichols’s wife, Mary, who were staying at the ranch: “The dam is broke! The dam is broke!”38 Nichols had already heard a “Rattling noise, like one of those big trucks.” Now he “couldn’t hear nothing but just a roar.”39 The two men ran for the hills, pulling a frightened and hesitant Mrs. Nichols. The flood was close behind. After the three scrambled to safety above the waterline, they could see bursts of light from severed power lines, flashing like lightning. Exhausted, Smith looked down at the devastation. “I never thought the water would come down like that,” he said later.
Around 12:30 A.M., an expedition from Powerhouse 1 was organized to confirm what had happened downstream. Eight months before, engineer C. Clarke Keely had worked to repair the No Name sag pipe after Owens Valley bombers blew it apart with dynamite. After that job was finished, his entire construction crew and encampment were moved to Powerhouse 1. When Keely was rousted awake, he was sleeping in the same bunkhouse he shared in the Owens Valley.
Gathered outside, the men set out into the night, driving in three cars. “Three of us got into my little Dodge roadster,” Keely remembered. “After riding for about a mile, we were at the upper end of the reservoir … It was just a mud flat out there.”40 He guessed that part of the dam must have broken loose. It was unconceivable that “the big section had failed.” Keely and some other workers had been on the top of the structure only two days before, checking the water level in the reservoir.41 Lineman Lindstrum climbed a utility pole and tapped into a line to call Ray Silvey in Powerhouse 1. “Ray,” he said, “your lake is gone.”42
The men immediately drove back to the powerhouse, where they set off warning sirens. Returning to their cars, they took a high road above the reservoir to the Powerhouse 2 surge chamber. When they arrived, Chief Operator Oscar Spainhower was already there. Below, in the dim moonlight, they could see the last of the floodwaters meandering through thick silt covering the canyon floor. One of the two generators, all of what remained of Powerhouse 2, was still moving, like a half-dead animal. Keely noticed “the exciter on the top … cherry red with heat, and steam rising from it.”43
By then, with crushing indifference, the St. Francis flood was well downstream, crashing from side to side as it followed the changing contours of San Francisquito Canyon. At its narrowest, the deluge was four hundred feet across; at its widest, as much as three thousand feet.44 When the flood arrived at the Harry Carey Indian Trading Post, the lower section of the ranch was washed away and the tourist attraction obliterated. The cowboy movie star was traveling with a vaudeville show, and his wife, Olive, was in New York City, but two caretakers were killed, along with forty-seven-year-old cook Solomon T. Bird, a veteran of World War I and the only African-American victim of the St. Francis Dam disaster.
Less than forty minutes after the collapse, the leading edge of the flood emerged from the confines of San Francisquito Canyon and widened. The Edison Company Saugus Substation, between the town of Saugus and Castaic Junction, was ahead. By now, the oil switch fire was under control. Frank Thees was standing outside with other employees. “We heard a roaring noise which at first we thought was a train on the tracks near the highway. We soon realized … that a large volume of water was running down the Santa Clara River.”
The men guessed that the St. Francis Dam had failed and ran to their cars to warn others and save their families. “Just at this instant one of the Big Creek Lines flashed over and lit up the entire country, showing us that water was already across the highway,” Thees remembered. When power went out at Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light Powerhouse 1, the Edison-owned Big Creek line picked up the load, but the extra burden proved to be too much. After Big Creek failed, the Santa Clara River Valley and parts of Los Angeles lost power.
Frank Thees quickly gathered his family into his car. His son, Frank Jr., six years old at the time, would never forget what happened next: “I went into the water almost to my waist … I looked back over my shoulder and saw the car, lights still on, with the water up to the headlights … just two glowing circles in
the dark … Then the wall of water struck. I remember being tumbled over and ground into the gravel and my arm being pulled violently.” As the water rushed by, young Thees found himself pinned against a utility pole. Finally, he felt the ground beneath him. The flood had passed and he was lying facedown in the mud. As he struggled to get up, “two white objects came into my view through the darkness. They were my parents coming out of the water.”45
Just as the Thees family was overwhelmed by the flood, Edison substation employees Ray Starbard and Howard Holt were trying to escape in Holt’s pickup. They were stopped short by a seventy-five-foot-high wall of water. When the wave hit, Starbard was thrown free as Holt and his truck were swept away. Escaping to higher ground, Starbard flagged down an approaching car and warned the driver. With the Edison lineman standing on the running board, they sped to Wood’s Garage in Saugus, where Starbard succeeded in making phone calls to an Edison dispatcher east of Los Angeles and the Newhall Sheriff’s office.46 He thought it was shortly before one A.M.
Pulled by gravity and guided by terrain, the floodpath turned west toward the Santa Clara River, heading toward the Pacific Ocean forty miles away. U.S. Highway 99, the popular tourist route linking Northern and Southern California, passed through Castaic Junction, where a Southern Pacific rail link and California Highway 126 forked west into the Santa Clara River Valley. A café, gas and auto-service station, and a tourist camp were nearby, with eight cabins for those who chose to make an overnight stop. The area was surrounded by alfalfa fields, property of the largest landowner in the area, the Newhall Land and Farming Company. Around 12:50 A.M., the crossroads was quiet. At the service station, a man finished tinkering with his Model T and drove west toward the town of Piru.47
