Catastrophic failure

At five minutes to midnight, on Thursday, March 12, 1928, the towns of Santa Paula, Newhall, Piru and Fillmore were undoubtedly peaceful, sequestered from harm, residents asleep in their warm beds. Less than three minutes later, all hell would break loose and more than 450 people would be dead. Eighty years ago, the single-worst engineering disaster of the 20th Century in the United States and the second worst disaster in California history occurred, scarring Ventura County. The St. Francis Dam

Disaster is a tragedy of unparalleled proportions; one that may have been avoidable and, historians say, should never be forgotten.

“In 1928 a disaster in a relatively isolated agricultural community was essentially off the map,” said Jon Wilkman, who has produced a documentary on the subject.

Why the dam was built and why it failed is a complex story of greed, vision, money and dreams of the future. Fundamentally it’s about an essential human resource — water.

Desert

Few of us understand that Southern California is, and has always been, a semi-arid environment. Water, we assume, has always been plentiful. Every day we observe people washing their cars and shopkeepers hosing down concrete sidewalks. We see lush lawns and gardens, and it streams effortlessly from our faucet as we brush our teeth. But water comes at a price, even the price of death. The fact remains that Southern California experiences below normal rainfall two out of every three years. But in the 1920s, when fewer people lived in L.A. or Ventura, water was not an issue.

But then L.A. began to grow exponentially. William Mullholland, the chief engineer of the Bureau of Water Works and Supply, the precursor to the Department of Water and Power (DWP), envisioned Los Angeles as a utopia for millions of people, who dwelt on the shores of the Pacific Ocean as carefree sojourners. He realized, however, that Los Angeles would soon run out of the one thing that made its existence possible in the first place — water. But where does one find vast quantities of water? The Owens Valley
was a rural farming community 250 miles north of L.A., and it held massive amounts of water, fresh from the snow packs of the Sierra Nevada’s, which could provide the burgeoning metropolis with every drop it needed.

Deception

Los Angeles began to surreptitiously buy water and land rights in the Owens Valley. Even today, L. A. is the largest landowner in the area. But getting the water to Southern California was a problem, unless you were William Mulholland. In 1910 he designed and constructed an aqueduct 230 miles long, using gravity flow over mountains and across deserts, and it is still recognized as one of the great engineering achievements of the early 20th Century.

Owens Valley farmers, believing they had been mislead when they sold their property, eventually took their case to President Theodore Roosevelt, who decreed “the ultimate greatest good for the greatest number,” thus allowing L.A. unencumbered access to Owens Valley water. As water levels in the Owens Valley decreased, anger increased. Mulholland’s aqueduct was repeatedly dynamited, 10 times in all.

Los Angeles continued to grow much faster than anyone anticipated. When the Owens Valley ran dry, L.A secured water from Mono Lake, north of Owens Valley; then the Colorado River in Nevada; then the Feather River near Sacramento. That the City of Los Angles was unable to secure a dam site in the Owens Valley, known as Long Valley, in order to build a vast reservoir would prove to be a terrible and costly oversight. Los Angeles may have paid the bill due to lawsuits and clean-up costs after the St. Francis failed, but it was Ventura County that suffered the heavy losses, even though it wasn’t Ventura County’s water.

Mulholland believed that a series of dams and reservoirs closer to L.A and away from the politically unstable Owens Valley would be a safe bet in case emergency water was needed. He decided on a narrow canyon, north of Santa Clarita, known as San Fransicquito Canyon. After the failure, Mullholland, horrified at the devastation, assumed full responsibly for the disaster, a rare event for any public figure then or since.

“If there was human error, it was mine,” he told the coroner’s inquest.

Eighty years later, it’s understood that Mullholland was not completely culpable in the failure of the dam. J. David Rodgers, Ph. D., holds the only endowed chair in geological engineering in the United States. As a professor at Missouri University of Science & Technology, he has spent nearly three decades researching the St. Francis Dam. His book, The St. Francis Dam Disaster and How It Impacted American Civil Engineering, will be released later this year.

“St. Francis had so many shortcomings, it may be impossible to unravel precisely which factors were most important,” he says. However, there were major blunders.
Construction

Construction began in April 1924. In July of that year, the original dam height of 184 feet was extended 10 vertical feet in order to expand its holding capacity for the droves of people flooding into Los Angeles. One year later, in July 1925, another 10 vertical feet was added. Raising the dam 20 feet allowed more storage capacity, but what was overlooked was widening its base to be commensurate with its new height. Known as “hydraulic uplift,” the base of the dam actually rose up slightly prior to its demise due to its inherent instability. It short, it became top-heavy.

“The dam was a seriously overstressed structure,” Rogers said. Additionally, the rock the dam was anchored to, known as schist, a flaky metamorphic rock, was not fully understood by the engineers at the time, nor did they know the mountain was part of an ancient landslide and was also inherently unstable. Simply put, the technology did not exist to know unequivocally that the rock was solid. It wasn’t. The dubious rock was becoming saturated with water. A second landslide was inevitable, and along with the increased hydrostatic pressure on the dam, it failed catastrophically.

Ironically, on March 11, the day before the failure, Mullholland himself inspected the dam about 10:30 in the morning and pronounced it secure. Sixteen hours later, Mullholland would be standing near the same spot, a broken man standing in front of his broken dam. Other dams in California have failed as well; the Baldwin Hills reservoir in 1963, then a year later, Hell Hole in Northern California. However, no one was injured.

Failure

At 11:57 p.m., the St. Francis Dam collapsed. The left side of the dam gave way first, unable to support the weight of nearly 13 billion gallons of water. What was once a life-giving force turned wrought death as it made its way directly to Castaic Junction then merged with the Santa Clara River. The initial wall of water was 200 feet high. Of the 70 people that lived just below the dam, only three survived, according to Frank Rock, a local historian who conducts tours of the dam. By the time the water hit Castaic Junction, near Magic Mountain, it was 75 feet high, and Santa Paula faced a torrent still 25 feet high with trees and broken houses acting like battering rams obliterating anything in its way. The path of destruction was 54 miles long. In Newhall, a makeshift morgue was set up in the dance hall, which was still festooned with decorations from the dance held there the night before.

“Bodies found by the river were so heavily encrusted with mud they had to be hosed off when they got to the mortuary to see if they were breathing,” recalled survivor Elizabeth Blanchard.

Survivor Doris Jackson said, “The water took everything. Everything was dead except a duck.”

Five and a half hours after the dam collapsed, it lapped the Pacific Ocean near Ventura Harbor. Driving up Highway 126, it’s possible to retrace the nearly exact route the water took through the Santa Clara River.

The official death toll was approximately 450 people. Historian Frank Rock estimates the number closer to 600 people. Many historians believe with the number of migrant Mexican farm orkers living at Camulos, the death toll was much higher.

“There were a lot of Hispanics living by the river and a lot got killed,” recalled survivor Eva Griffiths of Santa Paula. “The police tried to warn them, but they didn’t understand English. It was terrible,” she said.

Poor immigrant workers don’t land on the front page of major newspapers, not in 1928 and certainly not in 2008. But they died, possibly by the hundreds.
Cattle too; livestock, cars, roads, power lines, bridges, rail track, farms, all washed to the ocean or covered in a blanket of mud, debris and wreckage nearly 30 feet thick.

Bodies were recovered as far south as San Diego. Some bodies were found weeks later in the isolated canyons along the Santa Clara River. And some bodies have never been found. Men, women and children were obliterated in the middle of the night, in their beds. Some fought the torrent of water, only to drown or be crushed by the fast moving debris. Some families died instantaneously, family pets being the only survivors; mute witnesses to the unthinkable.

The numbers are staggering: 1,200 homes demolished, 24,000 acres of fertile land destroyed, almost 11,000 acres of crops laid waste, 140,000 trees uprooted or badly damaged. Upward of 3,000 volunteers searched for bodies. At first Mulholland feebly suggested that angry Owens Valley residents had dynamited the dam. But blowing up the dam would have been almost impossible.

“Trying to dynamite the St. Francis would be like throwing a firecracker against a wall,” Frank Rock explained.
The dam was simply too massive. That the City of Los Angeles and Mullholland eventually assumed responsibility offered little solace to the many victims, but at least it was courageous.

“Mulholland took responsibility for the design and he took the blame for Los Angeles,” said Frank Rock. His career was effectively over.

The reality is that the St. Francis Dam should never have been built where it was. Had Los Angeles secured the necessary property rights for the Long Valley reservoir, the St. Francis would not have been constructed. But politics and myopic thinking prevented a logical solution. The fact remains that the St. Francis Dam killed scores of people, bankrupted farmers in the Owens Valley, and brought riches to Los Angeles. If history means anything, L.A’s success was purchased on the backs of dead and dying people.

Yet, in some way, perhaps as a civic responsibility, Roosevelt was right when he championed the “greatest good for the greatest number,” idea. After all, we live in a democracy and democracies are about people, even those who may have died in vain in order to secure the greater good.

Aftermath

After multiple inquires and reports, dam safety legislation changed. Prior to the St. Francis, there was little dam construction oversight.

“Without dead people,” Rogers says, “the emotion just isn’t there to act upon information, regardless of how important that information is.”

Two days after the St. Francis fell, the federal government required all its dams to be inspected (similar to the widespread concern of bridges after the I-35 Mississippi River Bridge collapsed last year in Minnesota killing 13 people). California mandated professional registration for engineers, which became the model for the rest of the country and aided in the cancellation of the San Gabriel Dam that was currently under excavation near Azusa. If completed, it would have been larger that Hoover Dam. It too would have been built against faulty rock. The DWP established soil compaction tests and acquired a greater understanding of hydraulic uplift.

J. David Rogers, the geological engineer, points to a multitude of design deficiencies as the culprits for the failure. It’s now understood that the dam was built into an ancient landslide, something Mulholland could not have known at the time, and in fact Rogers points to 254 dams worldwide that have been identified as having been built against such unstable rock, though currently still standing.

“Probably the greatest single factor was the decision to heighten the dam a second time,” he said.

The resulting hydrostatic pressure on the dam and its left abutment created an untenable situation. In fact, around 8 p.m., four hours before the failure, on a road that ran above the dam, one witness recalled seeing a 12-inch high mound of dirt across the roadway. The landslide had begun hours before the collapse.
“The entire mountainside was pushing against the dam,” Rogers said.

Today the dam site is, “tangible history,” as Rock calls it. Now, discarded beer cans, soda bottles and spent shell casings line the old flood path. Parts of the dam are still visible, though malformed and eroding. What is eerily noticeable is the landslide, clearly cut from the mountain even 80 years later. The few remaining survivors to the tragedy still recall the horror of the day. Some view it as history, some as an inconvience and some are still angry.

Catherine Mulholland, granddaughter of William Mulholland was more reflective when I spoke with her in 2007.

“By now we know that Homo sapiens have plundered the earth. We’ve dislodged, displaced and removed forests and oceans. We’ve flourished and also suffered. When you move water, things get destroyed in the process.”  

Historian Frank Rock gives tours and lectures about the St. Francis Dam. Contact the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society for more information: www.scvhs.org

For tales from survivors about the St. Francis Dam disaster, click here: http://www.vcreporter.com/cms/story/detail/?id=5782