by Jon Wilkman
While some challenges remained unmet, there was promise for positive change. More than a hundred years after the completion of the Owens River Aqueduct, Los Angeles still imported 89 percent of the water it needed to survive, but increased legal limits on water imports urged the city to the forefront of new approaches to conservation and resource management. By 2015 L.A. consumed less water than it did in 1970, even though the city’s population had increased by more than a million people. As an alternative to building large dams and reservoirs, rain runoff was increasingly captured in local storage containers and in natural underground aquifers. A portion of the city’s sewage also was recycled rather than rushed to the ocean through the 1930s and ’40s–era concrete channels that replaced the Los Angeles River’s original sandy bed.9
Beyond conservation efforts, there were ambitious plans for a $1.4 billion river restoration and renewal project, beginning with a six-mile section where concrete walls and channels would be replaced by wetland habitats and urban parks. If and when the project is completed, admittedly years in the future, L.A.’s waterway may not look like the Río Porciúncula named by Spanish explorers in 1769, or the “limpid little stream” William Mulholland encountered in 1877, but at long last Angelenos might have a proud retort to the age-old incredulous question “Los Angeles has a river?”
With all the talk of change, dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts aren’t about to go away, especially in emerging economies overseas and even the American West and Los Angeles. In 2015, with the region’s new approaches to water resources, DWP managed two aqueducts from Northern California and fifty dams, embankments, and reservoirs, more than twice the number in 1928. While as always the Sierra snowpack was a final arbiter, most water-resource experts agreed that without supplementary programs, snow alone could no longer be trusted to save the day.10
To confront this challenge, the technological responses that William Mulholland and past generations of engineers employed to solve water resource problems, including dams, reservoirs and aqueducts, are only part of the solution, even in today’s high-tech world. Underlying Mulholland’s great accomplishments and tragic failures was a system of laws, in the case of Los Angeles dating from 1781, and the edicts of the King of Spain, that gave the city sovereignty over the Los Angeles River. Later laws designed to codify water rights during the Gold Rush that began in 1849 were applied in the Owens Valley, and continued to underlie aspects of the modern legal system.
Even when the great early twenty-first century drought that gripped the West in 2015 inevitably ends, farsighted experts agree that innovative new regulations and public policies need to be debated and put in place before the water goes away again, part of a possibly worsening cycle that William Mulholland devoted this life to anticipating. In an era of global warming, for Los Angeles managing water resources with updated laws as well as new technologies is critical to the city’s sustenance and survival.
In 2015 the depths of San Francisquito Canyon looked much the same as they did nearly ninety years before, but important changes were under way. After the Tombstone was dynamited in 1929, it wasn’t easy to recognize the St. Francis Dam site. Since then, a close-up view became even more difficult. In 2004 and 2005, after heavy rainfall, a natural flood washed out much of the old road built along the canyon floor shortly after the failure. A new route was completed high on the western hillside, and access to the old road was closed to cars and trucks. In time, what was left of the abandoned asphalt highway was slated to be removed, further limiting opportunities for a closer examination of the ruins. To the conspiracy-minded, it seemed like another Chinatown cover-up in the making. But the reason wasn’t a new L.A. noir whodunit. The truth would have confounded private eye Jake Gittes and flabbergasted William Mulholland.
With the routing of the Owens River Aqueduct and construction of Powerhouses 1 and 2 in the early twentieth century, the Chief and the City of Los Angeles established control over much of San Francisquito Canyon. Now others were about to call the shots. They include a shy red-legged frog and a tiny unarmored three-spined stickleback fish. Both are on the threatened and endangered species list. National Forest land in the upper St. Francis floodpath is a refuge for these rare creatures, and in the future human intruders will be carefully monitored and their activities limited.
Despite this eco-power-shift in San Francisquito Canyon, the story of William Mulholland’s ill-fated dam promised to defy another return to historical oblivion. In 2015, after years of effort, local history enthusiasts, including Native American activists concerned with preserving sacred sites in the Canyon, began to work with the U.S. Forest Service and a local Congressman to add the dam site to the National Register of Historic Places. Along the existing overlook road, there were plans for a commemorative monument and interpretive signage.
Like those of millions of others, my travels often cross the St. Francis floodpath. The downstream area bears little resemblance to what it was in 1928. In 2015 housing tracts surrounded malls and office buildings in the planned community of Valencia. The new community of Santa Clarita, including Valencia, Newhall, and Saugus, is L.A. County’s third-largest city, with an enthusiastic historical society working hard to maintain memories of the St. Francis Dam. The old two-lane Highway 99 Ridge Route has been superseded by eight-lane Interstate Highway 5. Near the crossroads at Castaic Junction, where the St. Francis flood flattened the landscape, took many lives, and tore apart steel bridges, the giant roller coasters at Six Flags Magic Mountain provide thrills, but nothing compared to the terrors experienced by those who rode a torrent in 1928.
In 2015, the Santa Clara River remained one of only a handful of California natural waterways that have never been dammed or straitjacketed in concrete. But plans had been approved for a twelve-thousand-acre real estate project along the stream’s willow-lined banks—the largest in California history. The prospective developer, the Newhall Land and Farming Company, was saved from bankruptcy in the 1930s by restitution payments in the wake of the St. Francis flood.
Early twenty-first century Santa Paula remained a quiet small town. Some Main Street buildings had been restored by preservationists, and large murals portrayed the “old days.” Near the quaint train depot, the statue I watched unveiled in 2003 was still there. Called The Warning, it depicts two motorcycle patrolmen, commemorating the heroes who saved lives during the early-morning hours of March 13, 1928. The original design called for a single figure, an apparent homage to Thornton Edwards, the Paul Revere of the St. Francis Flood. During planning, local Mexican Americans reminded history buffs about Edwards’s controversial dismissal as Santa Paula police chief in 1939 and proposed that the memorial suggest that more than one officer risked his life that morning. By 2015, Latinos outnumbered Anglos in the State of California. Changing demographics were beginning to affect evaluations of the past, and not just the story of the St. Francis Dam.
Writing this book reinforced my conviction that the history of Los Angeles deserves more than convenient amnesia, simplistic stereotypes, or film-noir conspiracy theories. Exploring the consequences and ambiguities of what happened in San Francisquito Canyon is a good start toward a more nuanced appreciation of a city that was formed, for better and worse, at the uncertain edges of America’s future. Already, many believed the proactive policy and public responses by California, and especially Los Angeles, to a record drought that began in 2011 offered hope, or at least instruction. It was increasingly acknowledged that anticipating a water-challenged future will require new ways of living and working, as well as a safe and effective infrastructure to provide support.
In the end, I’m convinced the importance of William Mulholland’s life is more than a local tragedy, but a very American story that deserves to be evaluated as a whole, not defined by how it ended. Understood in the context of his time and not from the present’s omniscient point of view, there is much to learn from the Chief’s successes, and even more from his greatest failure. Certainly, the legacy of the
St. Francis Dam is far from outdated. The Chief may have accepted the blame, but at the time, the actions and indifference of many people and institutions, including the citizens of California and Los Angeles, were culpable too. In today’s networked world, such a shared responsibility is far less excusable.
I live a short distance from the oldest surviving reminder of the controversies surrounding the failure of the St. Francis Dam. The Mulholland Dam in the Hollywood Hills, unlike its sister in San Francisquito Canyon, still stands. The closest the concrete structure came to being reduced to rubble was in 1974 when visual-effects artists from Universal Studios collapsed a scale model in the disaster movie Earthquake.
The level of the Hollywood Reservoir has been well below half capacity since 1928, but the increasing water demands of Los Angeles haven’t stopped. In 2001 two concrete-lined tanks, capable of storing sixty million gallons, were buried beneath a landscape of shrubs and trees just north of what is commonly called Lake Hollywood. That same year, unconnected to hydrology, as an unexpected addition to the small, mostly forgotten St. Francis Dam songbook, California rocker Frank Black and his band the Catholics recorded a twenty-first-century ballad, remembering the floodpath and those who died, but the well-meaning lament never cracked the top ten.11
I regularly watch crowds of tourists, guided by GPS, arrive with digital cameras and cell phones. They leave their cars on a section of Mulholland Drive, strike silly poses, and capture selfies with the Hollywood sign in the background. The original Hollywoodland version, a 1920s real-estate advertisement, was reborn in 1949 when the “land” was removed, creating a world-renowned symbol of the capital of motion picture production. But evidence of a less glamorous past is nearby. If tourists take the time to look around, some can catch a glimpse of the concrete dam and reservoir below. I’m sure few if any are aware of a shared history with another dam and another reservoir, both long gone, and the loss of hundreds of lives, swept away in 1928.
Perhaps not many more are concerned about tens of thousands of other dams across America, ignored by politicians and voters who are unwilling to confront the challenges of an aging infrastructure that includes bridges, transportation systems, energy grids, communication networks, and, especially important during continuing threats of droughts and catastrophic floods, dams and waterworks. In 2013 it was estimated that at least $21 billion would be needed to respond to the precarious state of dams alone, and that figure had nowhere to go but up.12 Let’s hope it doesn’t take another failure and more deaths to finally disinter the lessons of the St. Francis Dam—or better than hope, why not act before it happens?
The remains of the wing dike appear on the ridgeline of the west abutment. (Author’s collection)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Although all conclusions are my own, many based on original research, much of the modern technical foundation of this book is indebted to the work of J. David Rogers, the Karl F. Hasselmann Chair in Geological Engineering at Missouri University of Science & Technology, Rolla. Historical analysis was greatly aided by the prodigious organizational efforts of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power archivist Paul Soifer, who eased access to decades-old Department records. I was further assisted by DWP waterworks engineer and unofficial historian Fred Barker, who read drafts of the manuscript, especially concerning the Owens River Aqueduct. That part of the story also benefited from a critical examination by California historian Abraham Hoffman.
Many of the firsthand reminiscences that play an important role in this narrative were excerpted from videotaped interviews I conducted with survivors, eyewitnesses, and other individuals with personal connections to the tragedy, including Allan Ayers, Elizabeth Blanchard, George Coldwell, Ivan Dorsett, Norbet Duarte, Eva Griffith, George Griffith, Beverly Harding, Doris Navarro Jackson, Sylvia Jarrico, Harry Lecher, Margaret Moreno, Paul Morris, Catherine Mulholland, Robert Phillips, Bob Proctor, Norris Proctor, Frank Raggio Jr., Joseph P. Reardon, Peggy Shaddock, Thelma McCawley Shaw, Ruth Teague, Manuel Victoria, and Alexandra Villa.
Others provided memories, family photographs, and documents, including Felipa Barrozo Chavez, Dorothy Cosper Christiansen, Bob Collins, Candi Hyter Lavaneri, Clarlyn LeBrun, Carol Rising Longo, Leona Mastan, Richard G. Mathews, Jack and Roxanne Neel, Joyce Mathews Scott, Harrison Stephens, Paul Raggio, Robyn Raggio, Vince Raggio, Jud O. Roberts, and Weldon Thees.
The story of the St. Francis Dam may be little known, but a small but dedicated coterie of researchers and local-history enthusiasts helped me bring this human and technological tragedy to life. They include Keith and Michele Buttelman; Charles Johnson, Director of the Research Library and Publications at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art; photo collector John Nichols; Leon Worden and Alan Pollack of the Santa Clara Valley Historical Society; Mary Alice Henderson of the Santa Paula Historical Society; and former DWP employees Dan Kott, a longtime resident of San Francisquito Canyon, and engineer Le Val Lund. Over the years, Frank Rock, Pony Horton, Heather Todd, Terry Foley, Paul Rippens, Don Ray, Carolyn Kozo Cole, Dace Taube, and Mark Vieira were knowledgeable sources of information and/or enthusiastic support. Early research into the Mexican-American aspects of the story was facilitated by Vangie Griego, who pre-interviewed Spanish-speaking survivors and eyewitnesses, and Michele Garcia-Jurado, who translated Spanish-language newspaper articles.
As the manuscript took shape, friend and author Mollie Gregory offered the benefits of a writer’s critical eye and a general reader’s point of view. In the final months, researchers Ann Stansell, whose master’s thesis cataloguing the victims and their final resting places provided important statistical information, and Tracy Burns and Julee Licon helped find and organize facts and documents.
The resources of a number of academic and archival institutions were invaluable, including the Automobile Club of Southern California; the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley; the Oviatt Library of the California State University at Northridge; the California Department of Water Resources, Division of Dam Safety Archives; the County of Inyo Eastern California Museum; the Fillmore Historical Society; the Huntington Library; the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Archives; the Los Angeles Public Library; the National Archives and Record Administration, Pacific Region (Laguna Niguel); the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society; the Santa Paula Historical Society; UCLA Special Collections; USC Special Collections; the Ventura County Museum of History and Art; the Water Resources Center Archives at the University of California, Berkeley; the Water Resources Center Archives at the University of California, Riverside; and the website of Water and Power Associates.
Research grants from California Humanities and the Ventura County Community Foundation supported development of a documentary film about the disaster, which includes many of the interviews used in this book. During this process, video editor Brian Derby and cinematographer Neal Brown were valued colleagues. Among others who helped make this book possible, I’m especially grateful to friend and fellow author Tom Shachtman, who introduced me to his agent Mel Berger at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, who in turn sold the idea to Peter Ginna at Bloomsbury Press and editor Anton Mueller.
As a final thank-you, it is customary to mention the support and forbearance of one’s spouse, but my late wife Nancy contributed much more. It was only after I decided to write this book, shortly after her death, that I fully appreciated her contribution to the decades of research we shared. Without Nancy’s independent efforts to uncover, organize, and evaluate a formidable amount of information, this book might still be unfinished. I know she would forgive any errors or misinterpretations, but immediately remind me they are solely my responsibility.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Newspapers
Camarillo News
Fillmore Herald/American
El Heraldo Mexicana
Hollywood Daily Citizen
La Opinion
La Voz de Colonia
Los Angeles Examiner
Los Angeles Record
Los Angeles Times
Newhall Signal
New York Times
Oxnard Courier
San Francisco Bulletin
San Francisco Chronicle
Santa Paula Free Press
Santa Paula Chronicle
Ventura Daily Post
Ventura Free Press
Ventura Star
Wall Street Journal
Official Reports and Documents
American Society of Civil Engineers. “Essential Facts Concerning the Failure of the St. Francis Dam,” Proceedings of the ASCE, vol. 55, no. 8 (October 1929), and part 2 (August–December 1929): 2147–2163.
American Society of Civil Engineers. Proceedings of the ASCE, vol. 56, no. 4 (April 1930), and no. 5 (May 1930): 1023–32.
Committee Report for the State. “Causes Leading to the Failure of the St. Francis Dam.” Sacramento: 1928.
Grunsky, C.E., and E.L. Grunsky. “Report on the Failure March 12th to 13th, 1928 of the St. Francis Dam, Accompanied by a Report on the Failure with a Special Reference to the Geology of the Damsite by Dr. Bailey Willis.” April 1928.
Hill, Robert T., et al. “Report on the Failure of the St. Francis Dam on March 12, 1928.” 1928.
