Floodpath
Page 29
Leaving Whittier, Outland transferred to Boston College, but his academic education, as with many of his generation, was interrupted by the Great Depression. Young Charley came home to begin a career as a successful Santa Clara River Valley rancher. Raising walnuts, lima beans, lemons, and flowers for the Burpee Seed Company paid the bills, but Outland’s passion was history. In the 1950s, he joined the Ventura County Historical Society and was the editor of the organization’s Quarterly between 1955 and 1965.
In 1962, Outland managed the publication of the Historical Society’s first book, a collection of letters written by a local nineteenth-century priest.3 He also collected and catalogued rare documents and indexed the archives of Ventura and Los Angeles newspapers, creating an important historical resource. “It’s boring as heck,” he admitted, “but important.” Through it all, memories of the St. Francis Dam disaster rarely left his mind. By the 1960s, few outside the Santa Clara River Valley remembered the 1928 tragedy. In 1931 there had been talk in Santa Paula about a special memorial ceremony to remember flood victims, including a flyover by a formation of airplanes, but it was deemed too expensive and canceled.4 Aside from an occasional mention in local papers, not much happened after that. Outland determined to remedy years of oversight. He would write a book to tell the full story for the first time.
To many university scholars, Outland was an enthusiastic amateur, or at best classified with barely concealed condescension as “a local historian.” The Santa Paula rancher was neither a tenured Ph.D. nor trained engineer, but like William Mulholland, he disdained academic pretensions. He enjoyed exposing errors in work written by degreed historians whom he claimed depended more on citing one another’s work than exploring information off the beaten path. As a young cousin remembered, “It gave him almost exquisite pleasure to expose some well-regarded person as not really knowing the facts.”5
As with others interested in expanding and deepening an appreciation of the importance of the West in American history, Outland lamented the tunnel vision of East Coast scholars, who focused on a natural disaster like the San Francisco earthquake but ignored the comparable man-made catastrophe that occurred in obscure San Francisquito Canyon.
Like William Mulholland, Outland had little patience with red tape and bureaucracies. In the 1960s, the California Division of Highways used eminent domain to acquire some of his property to widen Highway 126 through the Santa Clara River Valley. When Outland learned his former house was being used as a construction office, annoyed by governmental presumption, he demanded the building be torn down.6
Outland’s father was one of many in Santa Paula who claimed and received restitution for losses caused by the St. Francis flood. Given what the dam failure had done to people and property in the Santa Clara River Valley, there was little reason for Charles Outland to respect William Mulholland’s larger-than-life reputation. The two men never met, but their personalities shared similarities. Both were characterized by determination, independent integrity, and a defiant pride in a self-taught advanced education. As a rancher, Outland enjoyed cowboy hats and string ties, worked with his hands, and wasn’t intimidated by unexpected challenges. One time he confronted a burglar with a shotgun and held the thief at bay until the sheriff arrived. Only then did he reveal the weapon was not loaded.7
Charley may have been “just a local historian,” but his investigative standards were high. Unlike other writers with agendas who had examined the history of the DWP and the life of William Mulholland, Outland was determined to be scrupulously fair. He was committed to finding verifiable facts and following them wherever they led. In the preface to his book Man-Made Disaster: The Story of the St. Francis Dam, published in 1963, the first-time author wrote: “Much that is sensational and sinister has been omitted … the author is convinced that a high percentage of this material is based on prejudice and emotionalism and not upon fact. The purpose has been to produce an accurate and documented account that will be of some value to future generations, not to embellish for the sake of muck-raking sales appeal.”8
Charles Outland during a visit to Texas (Ventura County Museum of History and Art)
An obsessed investigator, Outland wanted to give voice to a story he believed had been hushed up for years. Although there had been the occasional magazine story, and even a novel published in the 1950s,9 an accurate and in-depth retelling was long overdue, and Outland was convinced there was much more to learn. Even though thirty-five years had passed, the thought of revisiting the St. Francis floodpath made some people uncomfortable, not only among political and business leaders in Los Angeles and the staffs of the DWP and Southern California Edison, but also among people in the Santa Clara River Valley. First-person accounts hadn’t been recalled since hasty newspaper interviews immediately after the flood, and no one since 1928 had read the affidavits collected by the County Sheriff’s Department or closely examined the transcripts of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Inquest. The numerous engineering reports and studies released in the aftermath of the failure hadn’t been consulted since the 1930s and virtually ignored after that.
Outland also knew there were residents of San Francisquito Canyon and the Santa Clara River Valley who had never been questioned. As he asked around, he discovered that some were hesitant to speak. During the Coroner’s Inquest, many of the DWP employees who testified seemed anxious and careful about what they said. Outland wondered: had they been coached and encouraged to “‘hang together’ lest some among them might hang separately if they said the wrong thing?”10 He knew that as early as 1928, unemployment had “already reached an alarming rate,” and he speculated that fears about job security could have played a role. Outland also noted that when he interviewed those same men years later, many were “approaching retirement age and were not in the mood to jeopardize their pensions by making statements which might prove embarrassing to … their employers.”11 Faced with eyewitness reluctance, fading memories, and hidden, missing, or misplaced records, the rancher-turned-historian hoped he wasn’t too late.
Since 1928, the Scattergood Memorandum—a minute-by-minute timeline derived from records of power outages from dispatchers’ log books and calculations based on evidence collected along the floodpath—was considered the final word on the chronology of events that followed the collapse of the St. Francis Dam. Hoping to use primary sources whenever he could, Outland was eager to see the actual operator logs from Powerhouse 1 and any original dispatcher reports. A representative of the DWP public relations department informed him that, if they survived, the documents contained technical slang and terminology that would be difficult for a layman to interpret. He assured the impatient historian that the Scattergood Memo was the best source for his purposes.12
When Outland didn’t receive answers, he raised more questions. He wanted to know when DWP and SCE employees confirmed the St. Francis Dam had failed, and when they issued warnings downstream. Given official reluctance to share original records, and confusion during the first hours after the collapse, Outland was suspicious of the precise timing found in the Scattergood Memo. “No one accused confusion and accuracy with having an affair,” he wrote. “Quite simply, the two are incompatible.”13
Focused of verifying the facts, Outland examined the Scattergood chronology with microscopic care. Unlike every previous investigator, including prominent engineers and geologists, he searched for errors or discrepancies and double-checked “official” calculations. When he interviewed the few former DWP and SCE employees who were willing to talk, he found evidence that there was reason to believe the St. Francis Dam failure was confirmed, or at least assumed, well before 1:09 A.M., the time set by the memo, and that there were other troubling conflicts in the chronology.
Sometimes the discrepancies were small, or open to alternative explanations, but in every instance Outland found they served to provide a defense for the DWP and SCE against claims the companies hadn’t responded quickly enough to save lives downstream. He also u
ncovered evidence that the longtime rivalry between the municipal and private utilities might have influenced after-the-fact memories and perhaps played a role in delaying warnings, even though the rivals were communicating during the first hours of the disaster.
Since 1912, when Los Angeles acquired its own electrical grid as part of the Owens River Aqueduct, there had been no love lost between the DWP and SCE. After the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, Edison management and employees were furious about what the flood had done to their operations, and outraged about the terrible loss of life at the company’s construction camp at Kemp. As a result, Outland found suggestions that some Edison employees might have found it hard to resist shifting as much blame as possible away from SCE and onto the beleaguered DWP.
The flood damaged standard telephone lines, but connections were made through a separate system linked to surviving DWP and SCE electrical transmission networks. Outland found contradictory evidence about how and when these communications links were made and how reliable they were. In some cases he found that precious time was lost with calls to company facilities, rather than informing police and telephone operators in the floodpath. As justification, representatives of the two utilities claimed no one knew what had happened and everyone was trying to find out, but men Outland interviewed who lived in Saugus and Newhall, far from the dam site, told him otherwise. Given long-standing rumors and fears about the safety of the St. Francis Dam, they said they guessed right away what had happened.
Given the confusion and fear at the time, Outland considered miscommunications understandable, but he couldn’t excuse what he believed was self-serving manipulation of the official timeline. When he posed tough questions to one former BPL employee who had been in Powerhouse 1 the night of the disaster, the eyewitness refused to respond. “There are some things we’ll never tell,” he said.14
Discrepancies in the Scattergood Memorandum cast doubt on some details of the official narrative of the minutes and hours that followed the failure of the St. Francis Dam, but they didn’t explain what caused the collapse. Charley Outland wasn’t a trained civil engineer, but his skeptical reading of the results of technical investigations and construction reports and a careful examination of photographs taken before, during, and after construction led to discoveries overlooked by the prestigious engineers involved in the many official investigations of the failure. If Outland was impatient with the airs of academic historians, he also questioned the hasty certainties of engineers who investigated the St. Francis Dam. “The slide rule clan,” he called them.15
The Santa Paula rancher had never designed or built a dam, but he knew that the relationship between the width and height of a concrete barrier, viewed in cross section, is critical to the structure’s ability to withstand tipping or overturning. By comparing plans and reports presented before and after the collapse, along with calculations based on photographs, Outland discovered a 15 percent discrepancy in the measurements provided by the DWP for the base width of the St. Francis Dam. The Governor’s Report used a figure of 175 feet, supplied by BWWS after the failure. Outland found other DWP records that showed the dimension as narrow as 151 feet, which would make the dam far less resistant to overturning. This was even more troubling given the fact that Mulholland had raised the height of the St. Francis Dam twenty feet, apparently without widening the base. That was a startling fact the “slide rule clan” appeared to have missed in their technical postmortems.
Along with an examination of the written record, Outland compared photographs of the finished dam with plans submitted by the DWP to the Governor’s Commission and other investigators. Again he turned up overlooked engineering discrepancies. The flared downstream toe of the dam, shown in the DWP elevation drawing, had actually been cut short during construction, another aspect of the design that reduced resistance to overturning. “The truth of the matter was that the dam had been born with a stub toe,” Outland wrote with a westerner’s dry wit.16 These construction discoveries may not have directly caused the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, but they added important new evidence of significant unrecognized design flaws in the so-called official record.
Armed with the new evidence he found, Outland wanted explanations for discrepancies in the Scattergood Memorandum and the troubling differences between the St. Francis Dam as designed versus as built. Before publishing Man-Made Disaster, he shared the manuscript with representatives of the DWP and Southern California Edison, hoping to elicit explanations and correct any errors he had made.
A letter from a DWP representative on February 27, 1962, added little to the known record. In response to one of Outland’s more pointed questions, he was told that the Department was unable to find any evidence of criticism of the St. Francis Dam by a “reputable” engineer before the collapse. Frederick Finkle’s warning in 1924 obviously didn’t count, knowing the Department’s disregard for him.
The Southern California Edison reaction to Outland’s manuscript and follow-up questions was testier. In a letter written on February 13, 1963, a representative of the SCE Public Information Department challenged statements in the typescript that raised doubts about the timetable of the flood. He expressed concern that this “could lead to criticism of SCE, employees and the company’s response to the disaster.” The author was accused of taking “literary license” and presenting “slanderous suggestions.”17
When Outland wrote back two days later, he couldn’t conceal his indignation. “I will concede that your company has an able law department,” he wrote. “But this excellence apparently does not extend into the field of history generally or the St. Francis Dam story in particular.” He rebutted each alleged “slanderous error” and venting his frustration further, complained, “I have received no cooperation from either utility at this late date.” If there were any unwarranted inferences and conclusions in his book, he continued, they were caused “in no small part by those who are afraid to open the records, even after thirty five years!”18
Despite Outland’s impatience with what he considered bureaucratic stonewalling, as he discovered errors and inconsistencies in the official record, he was careful to maintain his objectivity. Perhaps the worst accusation against William Mulholland was BPL laborer Dave Mathews’s assertion that the Chief had told Tony Harnischfeger the dam was unsafe and ordered the dam keeper to keep quiet. During the Inquest, Mathews was considered a key witness. His daughter remembered police guarding their home.19
Outland carefully evaluated the possible motives and inconsistencies in Mathews’s claims. In the end, he decided given the former BPL employee’s anger, emotional state, and the inconsistencies in his story, Mathews’s credibility couldn’t be trusted. Outland had no doubt that Mulholland was guilty of arrogance and ignorance when he built the St. Francis Dam, but he didn’t believe the Chief was a mass murderer who lied on the Coroner’s witness stand.
If Outland’s research had a gap, it was a familiar one. Unable to speak Spanish, none of his interviews, with rare exceptions, were with Mexican-American survivors and eyewitnesses. Of those who were, all were English speakers. In fact, Charley was one of those Anglo folks who ran things in Santa Paula, and his primary contact with Mexicans would have been as laborers on his ranch. Even so, Outland suspected poor Mexicans received less for their losses than other victims (“Anglo” is a term that would have baffled him).
When it was released, Man-Made Disaster, published by a small Glendale, California, press, was greeted with limited regional interest. Despite his frustrations, in the preface Outland graciously thanked the public relations department of the DWP. As part of a series about western lands and water, the Santa Paula historian’s book attracted attention in California, but not much farther east. Reviews written by members of the small fraternity of California historians were generally positive, noting that Man-Made Disaster was the first book to seriously tackle the subject. But there was detailed criticism from two non-academic reviewers.
Pierson Hall, a Fe
deral District Court judge, and former Los Angeles city councilman and Chairman of the Council’s Water and Power Committee in 1928, was assigned to evaluate Outland’s book for the Southern California Quarterly. The reviewer for the California Historical Society Quarterly, Lucius Green, another judge, now retired, had been the Los Angeles First Assistant City Attorney in charge of L.A.’s efforts to settle the Ventura County claims.20 Both Hall and Green had kind things to say about Outland’s “lively” account, but took umbrage at the author’s criticisms of the city’s attempt to avoid legal responsibility, and Green questioned the existence of a fully functioning Joint Restoration Committee. Outland fired back in lengthy letters, submitting additional proof that the City had indeed hesitated, and presented evidence that representatives of Ventura and Los Angeles worked in a balanced interaction to seek final justice. Privately, both reviewers admitted to the author they were wrong.
During Outland’s correspondence with Pierson Hall, the judge thanked him for not publicly mentioning the errors in his Southern California Quarterly review21 and made a stunning revelation. He announced he was convinced the collapse was caused by dynamite. Hall told Outland that in 1928 he had commissioned unpublicized tests, conducted by Zattu Cushing, the Texas explosives expert who testified at the Coroner’s Inquest, and followed them with evaluations by representatives from the Hercules Powder Company. Both studies appeared to identify cracks and stains that were evidence of dynamite. Privately, Hall confessed to being part of “the ‘past generation’ who did what we could to sweep the dirt under the rug.”22 He believed that presenting his suspicions of a dynamite attack would only create more delays, controversy, and unproductive rancor.
If Outland was looking to make his 1977 second edition a best seller, such a revelation would have done the trick. But as usual, he put facts first. As another example of the rancher-turned-historian’s commitment to exhaustive research and his unexpected technical expertise, he carefully examined Hall’s purported new evidence. After questioning modern explosive experts, Outland learned that when the aggregate Mulholland chose to mine from the floor of San Francisquito Canyon was mixed with the kind of cement the Chief used, a chemical reaction called “alkali aggregate reaction” occurs, which can result from the heat as concrete cures. It was a phenomenon unknown to scientists in 1928 and resembled “blast rosettes” left by a dynamite explosion.23 In a worst-case scenario, this chemical reaction can create cracks serious enough to compromise the strength of a concrete dam, but Outland concluded they weren’t a factor in the St. Francis failure.