Floodpath

by Jon Wilkman

  Instead, Lee wrote an article for Western Construction News, published on June 25, 1928. He advocated an east-abutment scenario caused by water percolating between layers in the schist. He also mentioned another interpretation for the Stevens Gauge graph. Given the uplift pressures that were acting on the dam, he concluded that the falling pencil line was recording a lifting of the dam, rather than a drop in the level of the reservoir.10 That could explain why large quantities of water weren’t observed in the canyon before the collapse.

  The investigations of Grunsky, Willis, and Lee added new details and points of view to understanding the St. Francis failure. If they didn’t invalidate the results of the Governor’s Report, they showed how much more could—and should—be learned. Halbert P. (H.P.) Gillette, a civil engineer and president and editor of the monthly publication Engineering and Contracting, agreed. Although Gillette lived and worked in Chicago, he maintained a winter home in San Marino, a wealthy Los Angeles suburb. He knew William Mulholland and was familiar with the DWP. In April 1928, Gillette published an article in Engineering and Contracting with the provocative title “Three Unreliable Reports on the St. Francis Dam Failure.”

  Dissecting the California Governor’s and Mead reports, Gillette concluded: “The extreme brevity of the study of this dam disaster … is alone sufficient to destroy confidence in their conclusions as to the cause of the accident … There is no scientific necromancy by which engineers or geologists can scramble over a dam site, and in 6 days or in 60 days be so cocksure of the cause of the failure as were the experts on these two committees.”11

  Rejecting the saturated-soft-conglomerate theory, Gillette wrote: “the dam had been in service for two years and had held water long enough to have softened the conglomerate many months ago to a point of failure if all that the committee says about this rock is true. Second, there are hundreds of dams founded on soft earth of all kinds, still in service in spite of the alleged inevitability of failure if softness and clay-likeness of the foundation lead inevitably to dam failure.”

  Concerning the popular demonstration of dissolving a conglomerate sample in a glass of water, Gillette argued that a single piece is hardly representative of the more complex formations found on the west abutment: “If the west conglomerate was the mushy stuff that the committee paints it, why did it resist erosion fully as well as the schist which the committee calls hard rock? Why did no observer discover such a mush above or below the dam? We fear that the committee’s theory out ran the facts.”

  Echoing explanations by Mulholland and DWP supporters, Gillette questioned the lack of evidence that an earthquake could have shaken the hillside loose. If Caltech seismographs failed to record the effect of multiple landslides at the dam site during the collapse, as well as the impact of tons of falling concrete and billions of gallons of water pounding the hillsides of San Francisquito Canyon, could they have missed an earthquake as well? Building on Bailey Willis’s discovery of ancient landslides at the dam site, Gillette wondered: “Was this a natural slide that no man could foresee, such as occurred … at Santos, Brazil, or was it artificially caused?” Again, the dynamite theory refused to be defused.

  Even if the doubts raised in Gillette’s article were encouraged by the DWP, or produced to enhance the Department’s defense, he raised questions that deserved better answers and more discussion. But time and interest were running out. Keeping the case open could undermine confidence in the conclusions of official investigations and help rebuild the Chief’s reputation, but also reveal embarrassing new information about the extent of Mulholland’s technical knowledge and expose embarrassing or even incriminating information about the inner workings and possible liability of the DWP.

  When William Mulholland accepted responsibility for the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, even though he refused to say what he considered to be the cause, it was enough to blunt a deeper inquiry for the Inquest jury and most observers. The leaders of Los Angeles had rushed to make things right in the Santa Clara River Valley, and no one in Ventura County was inclined to slow the pace with continued arguments and legal wrangling.

  West-abutment-versus-east-abutment debates seemed like geotech turf wars, but Gillette’s criticism was more far-reaching: “An investigation of the failure of an engineering structure is analogous to any scientific research problem that involved the tracing of effects to their causes,” he wrote. “Therefore, it calls less for engineering experience than for research experiences. The committees selected to find the cause of failure were strong on engineering experiences and decidedly weak on research experience … Consequently they seized what seemed to them the most obvious cause of the failure, and came very hastily to their decisions … It sounds ideal to say that an investigating committee ‘flocked off by itself,’ immune from any contaminating theories; but such a procedure may also make them immune to ‘contaminating facts.’”12

  Gillette may have missed the irony, but his criticism of Mulholland’s engineering evaluators was exactly what critics faulted the Chief for—unwillingness to entertain fresh information and alternative points of view. Whether they missed something in the rush for investigative results, or whether alternative theories were merely a way to blur public and professional perceptions, any detailed investigation of the St. Francis Dam failure began and ended at the ruins in San Francisquito Canyon and followed the floodpath to the sea. Along the way, there may have been valuable new lessons to be learned, but by the end of 1928, fewer people were willing to make the journey.

  Most reports that followed Grunsky, Willis, Lee, and Gillette didn’t go far beyond the results of the Governor’s and Mead Committees’ conclusions, faulting the foundation and focusing on the west abutment. In a wide-ranging overview written for the Engineering News-Record, Pacific Coast editor Nathan A. Bowers admitted that “just where the failure began and what was the sequence of events of the breakup will probably never be known positively.”13 Bowers had kind words to say about L.A.’s rapid response to the victims of the disaster and praised William Mulholland as a man of honesty and integrity, but didn’t excuse the Chief as an engineer: “the construction of a large concrete dam requires more than honest sincerity of purpose and high character,” he declared coolly.14

  One of Bowers’s most interesting comments concerned the Chief’s apparent lapses of judgment after so many years of professional success. “Possibly his [Mulholland’s] confidence in the adequacy of the St. Francis foundation was based on his experience in judging foundations for earth and rock filled dams, in which field he had extensive experience.” If true, that could explain a lot. Earth and rock-fill barriers don’t require deep abutment excavations, elaborate grout curtains, and inspection galleries, the kinds of modern design elements critics claimed the Chief considered “folderol.” Earth and rock structures mostly survive by sheer size and weight. But as every investigator pointed out, in the treacherous terrain of San Francisquito Canyon, Mulholland’s massive concrete gravity dam demanded more.

  Confronted with the reality of the deadliest American civil-engineering failure of the twentieth century, Bowers turned from critic to cheerleader, ending his article with a rousing tribute to his colleagues and an endorsement of the excellence of modern dam design. He seemed to consider William Mulholland, and whatever mistakes he made, as tragic anomalies. “The engineering profession will make no change in method or design or construction of concrete dams,” he declared. “It is no indictment of the profession that in building one structure some of the engineering principles which the profession has developed as good practice were entirely neglected.”15

  Despite arguments from some that the cause of the St. Francis tragedy was an uncharacteristic exception, Mulholland and the DWP faced angry longtime foes who saw the failure as systemic. Representatives of Southern California Edison and other private utilities encouraged the outrage, determined to end or weaken the practice and political power of municipal ownership.

  In response, DWP Board mem
ber and supporter John Randolph Haynes was eager to assure the public that everything was being done to discover the causes of the St. Francis Dam tragedy. As early as March 20, 1928, as the Governor’s Commission was working on its investigation, Haynes urged members of the BPL Board to cooperate, telling them that none of the engineers on the panel “held a prejudice against public ownership.” The pressure from private utility interests focused on the city’s Bureau of Power and Light. On March 19, Haynes wrote letters to the editors of the Los Angeles Examiner and Los Angeles Daily News, telling them to inform their journalists that the St. Francis Dam was a Bureau of Water Works and Supply project, not a BPL responsibility.

  On the defensive, BPL Chief Ezra Scattergood also distanced himself, reminding detractors that he had opposed the San Francisquito Canyon site. In support of large-scale municipal projects, Scattergood compiled a list of privately built dam failures and released it to the press, arguing that tragedies like the collapse of the St. Francis Dam couldn’t be blamed solely on the nature and competency of city-owned utilities.16

  The urgency of Scattergood’s defense had significance far beyond the borders of Los Angeles. As the results of repeated investigations pounded the reputation of William Mulholland and the DWP, like the St. Francis Dam collapsing again and again, the legacy of the Tombstone in San Francisquito Canyon cast a shadow across plans for the largest, most important water-supply and hydroelectric project in American history.

  During the free-market enthusiasm of the 1920s, business leaders were willing to endorse federal financing of large-scale projects as long as construction, operations, and profits were shared, or ideally left to private enterprise. Bureau of Reclamation plans to develop the hydroelectric potential of the Colorado River threatened to change this big government–big business balance of power. Even Los Angeles Times owner Harry Chandler, who rarely missed an opportunity to benefit from the growth of Los Angeles and who looked forward to profiting from the increased prosperity Boulder Canyon water and power would bring to the City of the Angels, opposed federal incursions into the lucrative privately owned electricity business.

  With the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, after years of heated debates and repeated filibusters, the fate of the Boulder Canyon Bill was caught in another political and engineering whirlpool. During Congressional hearings in 1924, the Chief had emphasized his years of experience when he told legislators that the site for a dam in Boulder Canyon was completely safe and “not only feasible, but easily feasible.”17 After March 13, Mulholland’s credibility was another casualty of the St. Francis flood, bolstering opposition to ambitious public projects. Congressman Phil Swing, with Senator Hiram Johnson, a major Boulder Canyon proponent, wrote an anxious letter to California State Engineer Edward Hyatt: “I will be glad to have a further statement from you regarding the fact that the St. Francis Dam disaster cannot be made an argument against high dams in general.”18

  The Chief had fought hard to bring Colorado water and power to Los Angeles, but unlike the annexation-or-nothing attitude he adopted with the Owens River Aqueduct, Mulholland encouraged the establishment of a regional Metropolitan Water District (MWD) to fund, build, manage, and distribute the flow to independent towns and cities throughout Southern California. While Southern California would be the largest beneficiary of Colorado River development, one of the Chief ’s most persuasive arguments was the fact that the MWD would be the project’s major paying customer.

  That’s what George W.P. Hunt, Arizona’s first governor, feared most. Hunt shared the bluster and walrus mustache of the late L.A. Times patriarch Harrison Gray Otis, but he was a populist Progressive and staunch opponent of the Boulder Canyon project, which he viewed as another big-business-driven California water-and-power grab by “the same Los Angeles interests who brought us the St. Francis Dam catastrophe.” Mocking the city’s reputation as a center of motion-picture frivolity and real estate hucksterism, he added: “While considerations which direct the location of a movie set or dictate the colors of the stripes of a salesman’s tent in the selling of sub-divisions … may be perfectly satisfactory for Los Angeles prosperity, they are dangerous substitutes for bed rock at dam sites.”19

  The ruins of the St. Francis Dam were more than four hundred miles from the Arizona capital in Phoenix, but on March 28, 1928, Hunt commissioned Arizona state legislator Guy Lincoln (G.L.) Jones to launch an investigation into what went wrong in San Francisquito Canyon and why. The Governor wasn’t seeking justice for the hundreds who died. His ultimate goal was to turn the California tragedy into a weapon. Hunt wanted to bring down Boulder Canyon dam before it was built. When a finished report was submitted to the Colorado River Commission of Arizona on July 15, the technical results mostly echoed previous studies, but the secretary of the commission expressed satisfaction: “No other conclusion could be reached,” he wrote in a letter. “The utmost care must be exercised in ascertaining the safety of a dam site before selecting it for water storage. The Congress has thus far failed to do this in the case of the Boulder Canyon damsite.”20

  On October 18, 1928 retired Army Major General William Siebert, Chairman of the President’s Boulder Canyon Commission, brought a delegation of engineers to tour the St. Francis ruins. He attempted to reassure the press that the visit was strictly routine. “As engineers we are interested in the St. Francis dam failure [but] not because we regarded that failure as having any particular bearing on the problem submitted to us.”21

  On May 25, 1928, the fourth version of the Swing-Johnson Bill finally passed the House of Representatives and was sent to the Senate for amendments and more months of wrangling. In the end, the Boulder Canyon project was the product of compromise, not a tactic Bill Mulholland was known for, but after the St. Francis Dam disaster, the Chief, once a combat commander on the battlefield for water, had been relegated to the rear guard.

  As a deal was hammered out, it was agreed that the benefits of Colorado River development would be shared through a compact between six states—Colorado, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—but booming Los Angeles was the biggest beneficiary. After all, in 1928, cities and towns like Wild West Denver, sun-baked Phoenix, and the dust-blown outpost of Las Vegas, population 5,165, didn’t need much water and power, and as far as anyone knew, probably never would.

  Funding the Boulder Canyon project came from the federal government. Construction was handled by a consortium of private contractors, not the “in-house” force account Mulholland preferred. Especially galling to men like Mulholland and Scattergood, but essential to the public-private deal, Southern California Edison, after fighting government-controlled plans every step of the way, walked off with the right to tap a substantial share of an anticipated hydroelectric bonanza.

  Although the great dam in Boulder Canyon didn’t require engineering lessons from the St. Francis Dam, the failure in San Francisquito Canyon couldn’t be ignored, especially when considering public perceptions of dam safety. If the St. Francis Dam was the responsibility of one boss in a hurry, the Hoover Dam was created by committees following a painstaking design-bid-build schedule that maximized independent oversight and conservative design.

  Bureau of Reclamation supervisors specified the latest construction methods, including predetermined contraction joints, cut-off trenches to alleviate uplift pressures, and a carefully controlled concrete mix poured in interlocking twenty-five-foot-by-twenty-five-foot sections to encourage uniform cooling and solidity.22 If the St. Francis Dam was built to less than optimal standards, the dam in Boulder Canyon attempted to anticipate a worst-case scenario. In only one aspect would safety standards prove inferior to those set by Bill Mulholland and the DWP. During the construction of the Hoover Dam, ninety-six men lost their lives.23 There were no fatalities associated with the St. Francis Dam—until midnight on March 12, 1928.

  13.

  Paying the Price and Moving On

  During the summer and fall of 1928, while the Boulder Canyon project cr
ept through a legislative labyrinth and a few St. Francis Dam investigative reports were yet to be filed, in Los Angeles and Ventura County settlement of death and injury claims and completion of repairs and replacement of property neared completion. Unlike the technical details of dam engineering, the process could be imprecise and emotional.

  After each case was evaluated by committees representing Los Angeles and Ventura County and a figure agreed upon, each claimant was asked to meet to discuss the results. The payments for loss of life were set at an individual maximum of $5,000, but the actual settlements varied based on projections of financial status at the time of death, future income, and, some argued, claimant negotiating ability. Relating to the evaluation process, First Assistant Los Angeles City Attorney Lucius Green told a newspaper reporter: “We have not tried to force them into accepting our figures, but where they thought they should have received more we have asked them to go away and think about the matter for a while. In the light of new facts we have sometimes raised the amounts we first set as just.” They lowered them as well.

  For survivors of the St. Francis flood, the value of lost personal property, like family photos, was priceless. Unfortunately, victims could receive compensation based only on measurable losses and details itemized on the Joint Restoration Committee’s claim forms, which needed to submitted before the September 12, 1928, deadline. To some, settlements may not have seemed enough, but in situations involving damaged or totally destroyed homes, often claimants were able to improve upon what they had before. Fifty percent of destroyed structures were more than fifteen years old and were replaced with new ones, usually worth more than the original.1 When it came to poorer victims, especially Mexican-American families, this generous replacement policy led to a few expressions of resentment from less-charitable Santa Clara River Valley Anglos.