by Jon Wilkman
Charlotte Hanna and her husband, Kenneth, worked at the tourist cabins. As they stood outside, flashes from the direction of Saugus burst into the night sky, followed by “a ball of fire” that lunged along the Southern Pacific railroad tracks. The couple expressed concern to seventeen-year-old George McIntyre and his father, A.C., an oil driller, who also witnessed the mysterious light show. A.C. thought it was static electricity from a storm. Convinced that something was terribly wrong and not willing to wait to find out, the Hannas ran for safety up a nearby hill. In the distance they could see headlights on Highway 99. “I guess that’s help coming,” Kenneth said.48
George McIntyre and his father became more concerned as they watched the mysterious lights and heard a distant roar. As George peered into the darkness, he saw something eerie. The tourist cabins were turning and moving toward him. Before he could make sense of what was happening, water slapped his legs and a powerful force lifted him away. A.C. McIntyre grabbed his son’s hand just as the full impact of the St. Francis flood hurled them into the night. Terrified and helpless, the two were swirled along until they grabbed a passing utility pole. Water, mud, and debris pounded from all sides. For the older man it was too much. “Oh my God! I’m hurt!” he shouted. He slipped from his son’s hand and disappeared into the darkness.
Alone, drenched, and battered, George held on as long as he could, until the turbulence broke his grip and dragged him off. Turned and tumbled, the teenager gasped for breath, sure he was about to drown. Just he was about to give in, somehow he found refuge, enmeshed in the branches of a cottonwood tree. The seventeen-year-old was frightened and exhausted, but alive. The St. Francis flood rushed on, leaving Castaic Junction “swept as bare as a pool table.”49 Churning with trees, barbed wire, dead animals, shattered homes, and battered corpses, the water rumbled toward farms, orchards, towns, and more than ten thousand people asleep in the Santa Clara River Valley.
The death toll was adding up fast when the telephone rang upstairs in the home of the Chief Engineer and General Manager of the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply, William Mulholland. His daughter Rose answered. She had kept house for her father since the death of his wife and her mother Lillie in 1915, two years after the Chief celebrated the triumphal completion of the Owens River Aqueduct. Harvey Van Norman was on the line with terrible news. Rose immediately awakened her father in the next room and told him what had happened. The old man, his mind still half lost in dreams, unsteadily made his way to the telephone. His daughter heard him murmur, again and again, “Please, God. Don’t let people be killed.”50
6.
No Time for Nightmares
Many victims of the St. Francis flood were hardly awake before they died. In the confusion of devastation, downed power lines, and sporadic communication, warnings took time, and the torrent was unrelenting. The downtown dispatcher for the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light eventually established an open line with telephone operations in Mojave, forty miles north. Shortly after one A.M., Ms. Jennie Hibbard, the Chief Operator of the Pacific Long Distance Telephone Company in Los Angeles, passed news of the disaster to the Ventura Sheriff’s office, the Red Cross, and officials of the Southern Pacific Railroad, who ordered trains to halt above and below the floodpath.1
Most important were calls to local operators like thirty-two-year-old Louise Gipe, a widow from Texas who was on night duty in Santa Paula. When electricity went out around 12:30 A.M., Gipe notified the city night watchman, who brought matches and candles.2 After the telephone alert from Ms. Hibbard, Gipe strained to see in the flickering light as she plugged and unplugged switchboard cables, making connections as fast as she could.3 In 1928, home phones weren’t common in isolated farmhouses and poorer neighborhoods. For many, warnings would come in person, or not at all.
Castaic Junction was already submerged when Joe Sokol, a Los Angeles poultry buyer on his way home to Porterville 130 miles away, noticed something large and dark looming ahead. “I saw the wall of water, like a gigantic looking glass, about 6 blocks away; the noise was thunderous,” he remembered. “I turned my truck and raced at 35 miles an hour. I wish that I could have gone twice that fast. The roar continued behind me, tearing onward mercilessly.” Sokol found refuge in the hills as the water crossed more property owned by the Newhall Land and Farming Company.4
“Hello Girl” Santa Paula telephone operator Louise Gipe (Author’s collection)
Twelve-year-old Louis Rivera was asleep in a small riverside ranch house two miles west of Castaic Junction when he heard the flood. Wide awake, he ran outside. He could see the water coming and hurried to warn his father, mother, and four brothers and sisters. “It’s only the wind,” his father said, and told his son to go back to sleep. The boy didn’t listen. He took the hands of a young brother and sister and pulled them outside, across the nearby railroad tracks, and up to higher ground. Looking back, the frightened boy saw his mother outside the house. Before she could move, the flood rushed in and carried her off. In the yard, an older brother tried to start the family car but was immediately engulfed. Louis turned away and tried to calm his terrified siblings.5
Nearly eleven miles from the dam site, the St. Francis flood hit with tons of brute force. A huge wave slammed into the two-hundred-foot-long Santa Clara railroad bridge. The impact tore the deck from the concrete foundation and tumbled it three hundred feet downstream. As the torrent rolled on, rail tracks were twisted and tossed aside. The arched steel-truss highway bridge over Castaic Creek was torn apart in seconds. Once the St. Francis flood found the Santa Clara riverbed, it widened and shifted gears. The water, between twenty and fifty feet high, was traveling at twelve miles per hour, packing enough force to effortlessly overflow farmland and uproot orchards.
Remains of the highway bridge at Castaic (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)
Earlier in the day of March 12, close to the border between Los Angeles and Ventura Counties and eight miles west of the Saugus substation, workers for the Southern California Edison Company had been erecting transmission lines. Near a Southern Pacific rail siding called Kemp, 145 men lived in tents erected on wooden platforms.6 Described as “one of the largest camps of electrical workmen ever to visit Ventura County,”7 the temporary community was equipped with electric lights and running water. It was situated above the Santa Clara River in the shadow of a hillside outcropping known as Blue Cut, a natural barrier that narrowed the Valley.8 By midnight, after a hard day’s work followed by dinner, conversation, and perhaps some bootleg hooch and a little poker, everyone was asleep except fifty-two-year-old night watchman Ed Locke.
Armed with a pistol, Locke patrolled the area, wearing a heavy overcoat to protect against the early-morning chill. Around 1:15 A.M., the company phone rang. When the watchman lifted the receiver, the line was dead. He probably wondered: who would telephone at such an ungodly hour? The failed call may have been an attempted warning from Charles Heath, Edison transmission superintendent, but Locke wouldn’t live to find out. As he continued his rounds, there was another sound, like a freight train, or perhaps distant thunder. The sky was overcast, but there were no indications of a storm, and the Southern Pacific tracks were empty. Before Locke could consider the possibilities, the first rush of the St. Francis flood arrived from the dark. Splashing through a rising tide, the watchman stumbled among the tents, shouting for the men to wake up.9
When the deluge hit the outcropping at Blue Cut, the water was forced up and back, creating a swirling current that picked up tents and the men inside while others swam for their lives.10 SCE worker Albert Hill saw “the tent flapping like in a great wind.” Hill and the seven men with him were up to their waists in water. “The confusion was indescribable,” he remembered. The tent began to float as the air inside made it buoyant, but water kept seeping in. Hill knew he had to get out. “I managed to get hold of the top canvas and having nothing with which to cut it, started trying to bite a hole in it so I could tear it with my hands. I br
oke out three teeth in the effort, yet did not succeed in making a hole.” A companion, L.M. Steenblock, found a nail protruding from a piece of wood. He ripped through the heavy canvas, allowing the men to escape. Free from their tent, they were immediately trapped in a whirlpool. After repeated circles around the canyon, the current carried some of the men close to shore. Battered and stripped of their nightclothes, they staggered to safety. Others weren’t so fortunate. Oliver Crocker saw men “being thrown about like straws … It seemed as though the water would never let go.”11
After swirling past the thousand-foot gap at Blue Cut, the flood widened again, spreading as far as eight thousand feet.12 On the way to historic Camulos rancho, mud and water devoured the wife and five of six children of Italian immigrant Joe Gottardi and roared on without a pause. At Camulos, an orange orchard was erased, but the old adobe and other structures, including a small chapel, familiar to Ramona-country tourists, were spared. So was most of the citrus and oil town of Piru, situated on higher ground. Seven Piru-area residents who lived closer to the river, including five from the Rogers family, were less fortunate.
Like the Raggios and Joe Gottardi, twenty-year-old George Basolo (Georgie to his relatives) was a member of an extended family of Italian immigrants. Just before the St. Francis flood inundated Bardsdale, the phone rang in the Basolo home. Georgie’s older brother Charles answered. It was the Fillmore operator with a short and urgent message. A flood was coming and the family had “12 to 15 minutes” to escape to higher ground.13 None of the Basolos had heard of the St. Francis Dam. Was it a false alarm, or a cruel hoax? Charles didn’t wait for an answer. He warned other family members in nearby homes, and everyone divided into three cars. Georgie was with his brother-in-law, Cliff Corwin, in one car. Basolo’s eighteen-year-old bride, Leora, known as Sis, was in another.14
As Corwin and Basolo tried to escape, they were forced to slow down when the edge of the flood rushed forward and surrounded their car. As the water rose, Georgie shouted, “I don’t want to stay here and die like a rat!” He climbed out the window and disappeared. The car kept bouncing along, staying upright in the flood. Corwin decided he should get out, too. He crawled onto the front hood and tried to hold on, but the force of the current was too strong. “And then I was into it,” he remembered. “It was just one big roll.” Tossed by tumbling waves, thick with mud and debris, somehow Corwin survived. Why? “Ten thousand miracles,” he concluded. “I knew I was going to die, but I wasn’t a bit afraid. I was consumed with curiosity. What’s it going to look like, because I’m going to the next world.”15
Sis Basolo saw what happened to her husband and Cliff Corwin. With the flood still rising, she drove on, hoping to save them. When an ominous wave rose and blocked the way, she was forced to retreat. In a separate car, another Basolo family member, Ethel, successfully outran the flood. She had recently left her job as a telephone operator to care for her three-month-old baby and ten-year-old daughter. Ethel knew that in a disaster, communication is critical. Leaving her children with relatives, she returned to the offices of the Fillmore telephone exchange. Even after she learned that her brother-in-law Georgie was missing, she remained at her switchboard, making calls to warn others.16
Ethel Basolo wasn’t alone. Along the floodpath in the Santa Clara River Valley, telephone operators, all women, were on duty. One newspaper account summed up their bravery: “There is only one thing that travels faster than a flood. That is warning by telephone … Many of these girls on duty during the night at their switchboards, had no way of knowing but what the water would rise so high as to sweep away the buildings where they were located, and drown them at their posts of duty.”17
Among the heroines were Mrs. Carrie Johnson, who was at work in Piru; Mrs. Ora Hill was in Oxnard, Mrs. Mabel Bradley handled the phone lines in Moorpark, Mrs. Matthew Marks was at her post in Saticoy, and Bertha Clarke was another fearless operator in Santa Paula, where Louise Gipe received the first warning from Pacific long-distance supervisor Ms. Hibbard.18 Gipe called the Ventura Sheriff’s Department and Santa Paula police. Motorcycle officer Thornton Edwards answered at home. Neither the operator nor the patrolman had heard of the St. Francis Dam. Edwards had been on the job in Santa Paula since 1922. Before, he worked occasionally as an actor and motorcycle stuntman for low-budget movie studios. He was about to become an action hero for real.
The thirty-three-year-old patrolman told his wife, Ethel, to wake their eight-year-old son, warn neighbors, and drive the family car to higher ground. Realizing that every minute counted, Edwards kicked-started his Indian 4 motorcycle (he preferred it to more popular Harleys), turned on the headlight and siren, and started a ride that would earn him the nickname “the Paul Revere of the St. Francis Flood.”19 Around two A.M., he was joined by another Santa Paula motorcycle officer, Stanley Baker. With engines revved as loud as possible and sirens blaring, the two officers roared through the low-lying streets of Santa Paula, stopping to pound on doors and shout warnings to sleepy-eyed residents.
A short time later, the Union Oil emergency whistle began to wail. People and automobiles were filling the streets as Edwards rode toward the Willard Bridge, which crossed the Santa Clara River. He was stunned to find a large crowd, mostly Mexican Americans, gathered on the wood-and-steel structure. “I knew very little Spanish at the time,” he recalled. “I told them that the water was not coming under the bridge, it was going over it. I said, ‘¡Mucho agua! ¡Mucho agua! ¡Muy alto!’ That’s about all I could say, and they got it right away. I didn’t mince any words. I just told them to go—vamos!”20 Edwards was well known as a storyteller who could mimic foreign accents. This time he added a few English expletives.
In Ventura, along the Pacific Coast twelve miles west of Santa Paula, Deputy Sheriff Eddie Hearn received a telephoned warning. Hearn was famous for his corncob pipe. It was said when he talked, the pipe jumped “like a pogo stick.” The speedometer on his Cadillac squad car was pushing seventy-five as he raced east on Highway 126. In a second car, deputies Carl Wallace and Ray Randsdell followed close behind. Around 1:45 A.M., the two cars slowed to stop at Santa Paula. The officers found evacuations under way. Hearn pointed the Cadillac toward Fillmore and floored the accelerator. Behind in their squad car, Wallace and Randsdell tried to keep up.
When the sheriffs arrived in Fillmore, they discovered a few people milling around. Randsdell quickly surveyed the scene: “the water was in the river, but had not reached its peak yet.”21 Hearn rang the fire bell to awaken the rest of the town, some of whom were still asleep. As people responded, he and Officer Randsdell returned to their squad cars and sped away. After only a short distance, the auto headlights revealed the road ahead was covered by an expanse of churning water, rushing toward a river bridge between Fillmore and the agricultural community of Bardsdale.
The water, thick with wreckage from upstream, including entire buildings and large boulders, hit with crushing force. Hearn jammed on the brakes. “[I heard] crashes and roar of water and noises and shrieks … [the flood] was about a half mile wide,” he remembered. It only took seconds to reduce the Bardsdale Bridge to a mud-soaked pile of debris and twisted steel. Pieces were scattered for miles downstream. Pipelines had been broken and the stench of petroleum filled the air.
Officers Hearn and Randsdell arrived too late to save thirty-five-year-old Motoye Miyagi, who operated a nursery near where Sespe Creek entered the Santa Clara River. Miyagi was one of the few Japanese who remained in the Valley after Mexican labor replaced most Asian workers.22 Miyagi’s countryman, Rynkichi Takayanagi, a truck farmer, survived. When he was tossed from his bed, he found refuge in an orange tree. Stripped of his clothes, his arms and hands grew numb in the fog and early-morning chill. Afraid to lose his grip, for two hours Takayanagi held the tree tight with one arm while he swung the other to maintain circulation.
There was no telephone warning for Juan Carrillo and his wife and seven children—only the sound of the flood and the sight of
the oncoming rush. Like other Mexican Americans, the Carrillos lived in the “willow bottoms” beside the Santa Clara River. They barely had time to get into their automobile and start for high ground. On the way to safety, Juan stopped to warn some neighbors. When he returned, his car had been swept away, and with it his entire family.
As the St. Francis flood roared on, it claimed victims and left survivors in shock and grief. Hezekiah (H.H.) Kelly lost a leg in an accident two years before. When the flood hit his Bardsdale home, even with an artificial limb he was able to climb to safety, holding the youngest of five children in his arms. The rest of Kelly’s family didn’t make it.
Frank Maier and his family seemed doomed as their home filled with floating debris. As a last resort, Maier grabbed his shotgun and blasted a hole through the ceiling. An ironing board jammed into the opening allowed him, his wife, and his two children to crawl to the roof, where they waited for the water to subside.23
C.O. Fraiser used his shotgun to save his sister-in-law: “[She] was badly scared, so I took one end of the shotgun and she grabbed the other, and I pulled her through the water and up the hill, which is only 100 yards away.”24
A feisty thirteen-year-old, Thelma McCawley, was in bed with the measles when she felt her Bardsdale home move. Thelma’s mother, Helen, and father, Milford, quickly gathered her and her seventeen-year-old brother, Stanton, but they were uncertain what to do. The teenager headed for a back door. “I said, ‘Mother, I’m going to get out!’ And my mother said, ‘Oh, you foolish child, you can’t!’ And I said, ‘I’m going to get out!’ And out I went, out the door. And that was the last I saw of them.”25
