by Jon Wilkman
One property claim offered a window into discriminatory 1920s United States immigration policies. It involved Japanese survivor Rynkichi Takayanagi. The flood destroyed the thirteen-acre orange grove Takayanagi owned in Fillmore, including thousands of young trees. He had legally purchased the property prior to the passage of the 1913 California Alien Land Law, a product of virulent American anti-immigration sentiment that had intensified and expanded during the 1920s. The 1913 California statute allowed Japanese residents to lease land, not own it, for only three years. Under this law, passed after Takayanagi’s purchase of the property, any recompense he received for his loss couldn’t be used to buy a replacement orchard. In his early fifties, the long-time resident of the Santa Clara River Valley was forced to change the way he had made his living for decades.
By October 15, 1928, construction and repairs on property in the Santa Clara River Valley were finished. A total number of 331 homes had been destroyed or damaged, along with 909 other structures. Personal property losses came to nearly $1 million. Agricultural damage was more than twice that. Repairing the land and riverbed of the Santa Clara Valley added up to nearly $15 million. The largest single payout went to the Newhall Land and Farming Company—$737,039.59.2
By July 1, 1928, the final injury and death claim investigations were complete. It is probably impossible to determine the exact death count, but the most accurate totals include 308 known deceased, 68 unidentified victims, and 117 reported missing. Half of the bodies buried in cemeteries along the floodpath are in unmarked graves.3 Loss-of-life claims totaled more than $5 million. More than 30 percent were for children under ten years old. Personal injury settlements were slightly more than $4 million. It would take more than a year to fully distribute the payouts.4
On July 18, death and injury compensation warrants were approved for the first nine claims, totaling $93,000.5 Claimants could take certificates to Security National Bank, a financial institution that agreed to handle the transactions without a fee, and redeem them for cash. The payouts were a sad dollars-and-cents accounting recording the loss of individual lives, revealing the inevitable inadequacy of establishing a market value for a human being, determined by social status, age, and potential earnings.
The flood took the lives of eight members of the Ruiz family. Survivor Henry Ruiz received a death and personal injury settlement of $4,613, the full amount asked for.6 Ethel Holsclaw, who wrote the letter begging William Mulholland to continue the search for her baby’s body, received the $9,000 she requested for the losses of her husband and child. The family of George Basolo, who declared he didn’t want to “die like a rat” before being swept away, asked for $12,000 and received the full amount.
The guardian of feisty teenager Thelma McCawley accepted $15,000 on her behalf for the loss of the girl’s mother, father, and brother. Louis Rivera, the twelve-year-old honored by cowboy movie star William S. Hart, received reparations for the loss of his mother, father, and five siblings totalling $20,000. The money was entrusted to his older sister Grace. James Erratchuo, who lost his wife and baby, received what he requested, $5,000. The spouse of the sole African-American victim, Solomon Bird, was paid $4,000, again the total request.
The heirs of Ed Locke, the hero watchman at the Edison Kemp camp, received nothing from the City of Los Angeles. Like other SCE and DWP employees, his claim was handled by California Workers’ Compensation Insurance. Workers’ Comp also covered the loss of angry Dave Mathews’s deceased brother Carl and his family, but an additional settlement of $2,709 was allowed for Carl’s adopted daughter Thelma and $1,500 paid for the death of Mathews’s visiting niece, Vida.
Dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger’s estranged wife, Gladys, received $7,853 from the city for the loss of her husband and their six-year-old son Coder. Leona Johnson’s legal spouse, Henry, asked for $17,100, claiming his runaway wife had inherited valuable family jewelry from her mother after her parents were killed in an automobile crash with a Pacific Electric Red Car trolley. After an intensive investigation by insurance adjusters, including conflicting affidavits that portrayed Harnischfeger’s “sweetheart” as a charming young lady or wanton woman, the final settlement was $1,350.
Not all victims of the St. Francis flood perished as an immediate result of the deluge. As a result of the strenuous rescue operations, L.A. County Sheriff William Smith died after four days without sleep. He was covered by Workers’ Comp. Edison employee Thomas Shaw never recovered from the shock of surviving the flood and passed away in April 1928.
In some instances there were deaths, but no heirs to make a claim. One example was Japanese farmer Motoye Miyagi, who was buried at Los Angeles city expense in the Japanese cemetery in Hueneme, California, south of where the St. Francis flood entered the Pacific Ocean.7
As payouts continued, the Joint Restoration Committee faced an important source of uncertainty and delay. On March 16, 1929, the Secretary of the DWP sent a letter to City Attorney Jess Stephens and Special Council W.B. Mathews summing up the situation with remaining cases handled by the independent Stockton law firm of Honey and Edwards. Despite claims adjuster Edward P. Garrett’s boast to make the city pay “until it hurt,” a little more than a year after the disaster the personal injury attorneys, and especially their clients, were ready to settle.
Juan Carrillo, who lost eight family members in the flood, was a Honey and Edwards client. Although Carrillo tried to renege on his agreement and join the Los Angeles/Ventura County Restoration Committee settlement, his contract remained in force. His lawyers initially demanded payment of $325,000. They agreed to $20,000. Joe Gottardi lost his wife and five children. Honey and Edwards’s original demand was $450,000. The payout was $25,000, but Gottardi got the city to agree to rebuild his home in an agricultural area less damaged by the floodwaters.
By 1930, the majority of Honey and Edwards clients had settled out of court, but Ray Rising and Lillian Curtis, two of three survivors from Powerhouse 2 (including Curtis’s young son, Danny), remained holdouts. In July, after months of haggling and delay, Rising’s claim for the deaths of his wife and three daughters went before a judge and jury in Los Angeles Superior Court. The civil trial lasted a month and featured a familiar cast of expert witnesses including the Chief’s relentless critic, independent engineer Frederick Finkle, and Caltech geologist F.L. Ransome, who had been on the Governor’s Investigation Commission.
Representing Los Angeles in the civil case, City Attorney Jess Stephens argued that the failure was an Act of God, this time suggesting the possibility of an earthquake. Once again, a withdrawn but resolute Mulholland was grilled on the stand and the jury watched a sample of San Francisquito Canyon conglomerate dissolve in a glass of water. Honey and Edwards demanded $175,000 as compensation for the loss of Rising’s wife, Julia, and their three young children. A verdict was delivered on June 5, 1930. While the jury didn’t accept the City’s Act-of-God defense and seemed implicitly to agree with expert criticism of Mulholland’s design and construction methods, they awarded the plaintiff $30,000, minus Honey and Edwards’s $10,000 contingency fee.
To complete his claim, Rising submitted a handwritten letter to L.A.’s First Assistant City Attorney Lucius Green, signed on September 11, 1930. In it, the Powerhouse 2 survivor accepted $450 for his property losses. Later, he remarried and started a new family. In a surprising move, he returned to live in San Francisquito Canyon and worked as a Bureau of Power and Light employee in rebuilt Powerhouse 2. As an explanation, he said he enjoyed the job, and with other families around, considered the rural canyon a good place to raise kids. His new home was located almost exactly where he lived on the night of March 12, 1928.8
When she was nine, Rising’s daughter, Carol, was stunned to learn her father had been married before, with a wife and family who had been wiped out by a great flood in San Francisquito Canyon. When she asked what happened, her father announced he would answer any of her questions, but only once, and never discuss the tragedy again. Rising rema
ined true his word.
The failure and flood were a “forbidden topic,” but Carol remembered her father didn’t conceal a lifelong antipathy toward lawyers, and, surprisingly, the Red Cross. Despite everything the relief organization had done, some small-town St. Francis flood victims were angered to learn that a portion of the money raised for the Santa Clara River Valley went to the Red Cross national fund to respond to future disasters elsewhere, a standard practice with the organization. As for the final settlement, Carol learned the payment had been set aside for her. Her father refused to personally “spend a penny of it.” He considered it “blood money.”9
By the summer of 1930, only one major claim remained unresolved. Honey and Edwards initially demanded $252,627 as compensation for the deaths of Lillian Curtis’s husband, Lyman, and the couple’s two young daughters. Following the Rising verdict, the case was settled out of court for $31,662. Honey and Edwards fees, commissions, and monies the firm had advanced to Curtis totaled $11,403.80.10 With that, the last unresolved claim against the City of Los Angeles for the tragedy of the St. Francis Dam was closed.
Restitution had come relatively quickly, and it seemed most claimants were satisfied, but over the years there have been persistent intimations that payouts weren’t fair, especially comparing individual Anglo and Mexican cases, or the settlements made with businesses and large landowners.
As would be expected, initial claims for losses from both individuals and businesses tended to be high. Negotiations brought them down. Concerning compensation for property losses, individual Anglo claims were awarded 52 percent of the first request, while Mexicans received 36 percent. Companies, on the other hand, were paid 67 percent of their original claims. These differences could be accounted for by the difficulty in providing detailed justification for lost property, access to legal assistance, or simply negotiating experience and ability. For individual death claims, the differences between initial requests and final receipts were negligible—around 27 percent less for Anglos and 26 percent less for Mexicans.11
Despite accounting reports totaled to the penny, the final bill for the St. Francis Dam disaster is difficult to pin down. A summary in 1929 reported 2,828 claims totaling $28,788,227,12 or nearly $400 million in 2015. Even then, this figure doesn’t take into account indirect costs such as structural changes to the Mulholland Dam and construction of a new dam in Bouquet Canyon to make up for the drained St. Francis Reservoir. Another unaccounted asset William Mulholland would have placed near the top of the list was the 12.4 billion gallons of water that escaped in the St. Francis flood. In 1928 it was worth close to $3.2 million, in addition to the approximately $800,000 it cost to bring it from the Owens Valley.13
Whatever the final figure, the St. Francis Dam disaster cost Los Angeles a lot of money. The city paid the tab by drawing upon the independent financial resources of the DWP, loans, bond issues, a tax increase, and an increase in water rates. As late as 1950, loan interest payments were still on the books.
With typical L.A. hyperbole, in 1929 one city official described reported payouts of $23 million to Ventura County as “the greatest amount of flood claims ever presented in the world’s history. Even the floods of biblical times did not cause such damage, if the total amount of claims is considered.”14
On December 1, 1928, while the costs of the St. Francis Dam disaster were adding up, William Mulholland officially retired as Manager and Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply. Personally and professionally, he never recovered from the aftermath of the failure, but the Chief found it hard to leave the life and work that had absorbed him since 1878. To do so was to give in to guilt and agree with explanations of the failure he didn’t or couldn’t accept. On June 13, 1928, only a short time after the St. Francis flood and the final verdict of the Coroner’s Inquest, the Chief spoke at an engineering convention in San Francisco. His topic: the history and future challenges of “Water Supply in Los Angeles.”15
On July 1, 1928, Mulholland delivered his last annual report to the Board of Water Commissioners as Bureau of Water Works manager and chief engineer. He issued familiar warnings about potential water shortages and the necessity of tapping the Colorado River. In the sixth paragraph, “the loss of the San Francisquito Reservoir” was briefly discussed with an engineer’s emotional detachment. The Chief assured the Board that this “unfortunate” event wouldn’t be an immediate problem for the city’s water supply, but more reservoirs would be needed in the future. That said, he changed the subject to the state of distribution systems.16
The Chief’s replacement at the Water Department was his loyal friend and longtime assistant Harvey Van Norman. The Los Angeles Record had endorsed university-trained Ezra Scattergood. For the editors of the Record and other DWP critics, the transfer of power to self-taught Van Norman, a protégé of the Chief, wasn’t the kind of shake-up needed at the Department of Water and Power. When it was learned that the Chief had been given a small office and continued to work as a paid consultant, the news seemed to confirm that even the loss of life and destruction of the St. Francis Dam disaster hadn’t seriously affected the DWP’s semi-autonomy and considerable influence in Los Angeles. Certainly it indicated that, even in disgrace, William Mulholland retained the vestiges of an indispensable man.
Under other circumstances, the end of the Chief’s career would have been a triumphant conclusion to fifty years of public service. Five days after he stepped aside as Manager and Chief Engineer of the BWWS, the Metropolitan Water District, next to the Owens River Aqueduct perhaps Mulholland’s most important contribution to the future of water in Southern California, was officially incorporated. Even more significant, on December 21, President Coolidge signed the Boulder Canyon Project Act. Despite these landmark contributions, for many the St. Francis Dam disaster overshadowed them all. To the Chief’s family, including his five-year-old granddaughter and future biographer Catherine, and old DWP colleagues, many dating from the triumphant days of the Owens River Aqueduct, once gruff and confident William Mulholland seemed like a weary ghost.
William Mulholland with granddaughter and future biographer, Catherine (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)
With the final verdict of the Coroner’s Inquest, the Chief escaped conviction as a mass murderer, but in an ironic turn of events, his disdainful inquisitor, high-living, hard-drinking County District Attorney Asa Keyes, was the one who went to jail. On February 9, 1929, Keyes was convicted of bribery in a scandalous Los Angeles oil-stock swindle. Even so, as corruption investigators closed in during 1928, there was no evidence that Keyes’s penchant for payoffs played a role in his decision not to pursue a criminal indictment against the Chief. In the end, few if any wanted that. Disgrace seemed enough.
After serving nineteen months in San Quentin, the former D.A. returned to Los Angeles and began a career as an automobile salesman, attracting a few Hollywood stars as clients. In 1933, Keyes received a full pardon from California’s governor.17 That same year, the Watterson brothers were released from their San Quentin prison cells. William Mulholland hadn’t been indicted, or served time, but despite the best efforts of his friends and admirers, in the mind of the general public and future historians he was never exonerated for what happened in San Francisquito Canyon.
By 1929, along the Santa Clara River Valley floodpath an attitude of forgive and forget toward the City of Los Angeles began to settle in, at least in political leadership and business circles. Writing later, chairman of the Ventura County Citizens Committee C.C. Teague expressed satisfaction with L.A.’s rapid response and willingness to pay the price. “In these days when there is so much evidence of strong governments taking advantage of the weak, and when many are becoming skeptical as to right and just ultimately prevailing, the restoration stands out as a really great accomplishment,” Teague declared. “It is my hope that this settlement may serve as a precedent for the settlement of complex questions which arise in the future between persons and gov
ernment and may restore … some of their lost faith in the justice of humanity.”18
Only a few months after the flood, Santa Paula was eager to escape the town’s reputation as a disaster area. A promotional film was commissioned featuring local businesses and civic leaders. They appeared anxious to welcome tourists and new customers. However, one popular attraction wasn’t highlighted in the film. Almost as soon as the road was reopened into San Francisquito Canyon, the Tombstone became a destination for sightseers. Toting Kodak cameras, some snapped pictures for family scrapbooks or to send to curious friends “back east.”
Tourist autos lined up behind the St. Francis Dam Tombstone. (Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society)
The morbid enthusiasm began to fade on May 27, 1928, after eighteen-year-old Leroy Parker decided to scale the concrete monolith. On the way up, a mischievous companion found a snake and threw it. Startled, the teenager slipped and fell. He died a short time later in a nearby hospital.19 When the boy’s distraught father sued the city, the DWP decided it was time for the Tombstone to go. The jagged slab had become a dangerous public nuisance, but more than that, it was a memorial to a failure leaders of Los Angeles preferred to forget.
Dynamite may not have caused the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, but explosives destroyed what remained. On Friday, May 10, 1929, representatives of the Bureau of Power and Light supervised work as three hundred holes were drilled into the ninety-million-pound concrete monolith and five tons of gelatin dynamite packed inside. The plan was to break the Tombstone into pieces and tip the fragments into a deep excavation that had been dug to receive them. Afterward, tractors would cover the remains with dirt.
