I was watching one of my favored YouTube series, when a particular historical series showed up on my feed, reminding me of a notable but now mostly forgotten man-made local disaster: the failure of the St. Francis dam, in 1928. This dam was situated in a canyon in the San Gabriel mountain range, 40 miles north-west of Los Angeles, California. The canyon fed into the Santa Clara River, which eventually emptied out into the Pacific Ocean. The resulting disaster is comparable to the Johnstown flood some forty years previously on the other side of the country. Both disasters involved a sudden and horrific dam collapse, after concerns about the stability of the dam had been raised – and dismissed, with catastrophic results, but there are some key differences: the St. Francis dam was a new, carefully designed and watchfully tended concrete construction. It was a key component of water supply to a growing city – not a half-forgotten, shoddily maintained earth dam on private property.
I grew up in that part of the country, so the names of towns affected by the disaster in 1928 are all vividly familiar. I went to Girl Scout camps in Saugus, my youngest brother still lives in Santa Clarita, and my paternal grandparents lived for years in Camarillo, where the catastrophic flood from the dam failure finally washed out into the Pacific Ocean. The name of William Mulholland was also familiar. A scenic avenue winding through the range of hills separating the San Fernando Valley from Los Angeles proper was named for him. The family who lived in the house next to my maternal grandparents on Lotus Avenue in Pasadena were also surnamed Mulholland; I’ve always wondered if they were related.
William Mulholland himself was a Scots-Irish immigrant from Belfast, who ran away from an abusive home and went to sea as a merchant sailor. Then he knocked around the US as an itinerant laborer, before winding up in Los Angeles in 1877. He got a job there tending the various channels and ditches which supplied water. Somehow that work fired ambition in a young man who had drifted from one menial job to another, before finding his calling in a mission to supply of water to a growing urban population – in a place where water appeared all at once and then often not at all. He studied nights, taught himself engineering, with all the necessary mathematics to underpin a career as a professional civil engineer and eventually rose higher and higher in the civic establishment which employed him. By the early part of the last century Mulholland was the head of Los Angeles’ water and power division, dedicated to supplying water for a growing metropolis. His knowledge of the water system was encyclopedic, as most of it had been built under his supervision and to his designs. He was a key figure in a decade of underhanded shenanigans involving water rights, getting water diverted from the then-prosperous farming area around the Owens Valley to Los Angeles through a huge aqueduct, in use to this very day. This was known as the California Water Wars, elements of which were later and very (very!) loosely dramatized in the movie Chinatown.
As part of the immense aqueduct project, Mulholland felt it was necessary to maintain a holding reservoir to regulate the water supply – just in case of a prolonged drought or an earthquake damaging the aqueduct. Eventually his choice fell on a steep-walled canyon just north of present-day Santa Clarita, some 40 miles from Los Angeles proper, as it was then. Towns along the lower Santa Clara River include Valencia, Newhall, Castaic Junction, Fillmore, Bardsdale and Santa Paula; then a semi-rural country of farms and orchards.
Mulholland used the same basic design he had done for a previous dam, just adapted for the Francisquito Canyon site: a massive concrete gravity-arch construction, the same design as the later Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. After careful consideration, he selected a place in the canyon where the canyon itself was wide enough to accommodate a generous reservoir and then naturally narrowed at a point suitable to construct a dam. There were flaws in construction, one of which could be laid to Mulholland as a designer and sole authority for the water and power component. He increased the height of the dam by ten feet, without correspondingly broadening the base to compensate. The other weakness was a geologically fragile underpinning of the canyon, which would prove to be susceptible to the quantities of water in the reservoir, once filled. Although Mulholland directed bores and water percolation tests be run prior to beginning construction, technology available to him in the 1920s was not enough to detect that fragility in the layers of rock underneath and in the canyon walls on either side.
By the mid-1920s, the area along the Francisquito Canyon was an intermittent construction site, with camps for laborers, and small housing areas for workers at two new power plants. Construction on the dam began in August 1924 and was completed by May, 1926. As water began to fill it, some leaks and seeps were noted in the structure and in the abutment on the west side; noted and categorized as normal and expected in a concrete dam of that size. The dam continued filling over the next two years, without giving any particular cause for concern. The resident dam keeper, a man named Tony Harnishfeger lived with six-year-old son and his girlfriend in a small cottage about a quarter of a mile down the canyon from the dam. Harnischfeger was charged with regularly inspecting the dam and the abutments on a daily basis and informing his superiors in Los Angeles of anything out of the ordinary. Later, a close friend of his testified that Harnishfeger had expressed deep concerns about the dam to his employers and that he had been told to stop bringing them up or lose his job. Well – maybe … but if he had been that worried over the stability of the dam, one would think he would have found another place to live, rather than in a house below that dam….
In any case, on the morning of March 12th, dam keeper Harnishfeger discovered an alarming new leak – and one which spurting irregularly and of muddy, not clear water. This would indicate that somehow water had undermined the dam’s footings – not a leak in the dam itself, which would naturally be of clear water. He called Mulholland immediately. Mulholland and his assistant (and later successor) Harvey Van Norman, rushed by automobile to St. Francisquito canyon – a journey of some hours over mostly dirt roads in a relatively comfortless early model automobile, and joined Harnishfeger in examining the frightening new leak and the dam itself over a visit lasting several hours. Yes – it was concerning, that the water was muddy … but Van Norman eventually found what he thought was the real source for the muddy flow – the water picking up dirt from a new access road. The leak was worrisome, and eventually something would have to be done about it but … nothing urgent. The two engineers returned to Los Angeles, leaving Harnishfeger alone with his worries.
And that night, just a few moments before midnight – the worst possible collapse happened. Both sides of the dam utterly collapsed, leaving the center segment standing upright and still rooted in the canyon floor. No one saw it who could testify afterwards as to which segment gave way first – no one who lived. About the nearest witness to the disaster was a carpenter employed at one of the powerhouses in the canyon. His name was Ace Hopewell; he rode past the dam about ten minutes before midnight on his motorbike on his way back to where he lived and saw nothing unusual or worrying. A little farther up the canyon he thought he heard the rumble of a landside over the sound of his engine. Slightly worried, he stopped and listened – and the sound died away.
What Ace Hopewell heard in the distance was those catastrophic moments when both east and west sections of the St. Francis dam gave way, probably almost simultaneously. Enormous chunks of concrete broke into smaller chunks as the water behind the dam – as more than 12 billion gallons of water instantly rushed out. It was estimated later that the entire reservoir emptied completely in a little over an hour. No one below in the canyon had a chance. The power station below the dam was obliterated, as was the little hamlet where the workers and their families lived. Only three survived, out of the 67 known to be at that site. A sudden flickering in electric lights and a sudden drop in power in Los Angeles may have been the first indicator there of bad trouble.
At 40 minutes past midnight, as near as can be estimated, the surge of water out of the canyon burst into the Santa Clara River. By one AM, the water had demolished the power plant in Saugus, darkening the entire valley, from Santa Clarita to the coast. Raymond Starbard, employed at the Saugus substation is nearly carried away by the flood, but manages to fight his way out of the water and get to a working telephone. He calls the sheriff’s substation in Newhall, the next town down the river valley; he is credited with being the first to get the word out about the looming disaster.
Meanwhile, the flood overwhelmed a Southern California Edison worker’s camp laid out on the riverside flats five miles further downstream. The only warning the 150 workers there got was from a night watchman Edward Locke, a disabled veteran who apparently heard the rumble of the approaching flood and ran from tent to tent, shouting a warning. The tents were canvas on wooden floors: workers who went to sleep with the tents buttoned up tight against the night air had slightly better odds of surviving, as that provided a bubble of air inside which held out just long enough to float as the surge carried the tents away. Despite the warnings, 84 workers there were lost including Edward Locke. By now the floodwater included trees, brush, and wreckage from shattered buildings. bridges, and machinery; a deadly moving slurry of water, mud and fragments.
In the small town of Santa Paula, some thirty miles downriver, Miss Louise Gipe, a duty telephone operator, received an urgent warning of the dam failure from someone in authority at the telephone company offices. Miss Gipe immediately began calling local officials, including the police – and then began making individual calls to homes closest to the river. This, in a day when making such calls meant patching calls manually, one by one. Others notified was Thornton Edwards, a motorcycle policeman of the State Motor Division (a predecessor of the California Highway Patrol) who lived in Santa Paula and Santa Paula police officer, Stanley Baker. Edwards immediately woke up his family, and his neighbors, saw them to safety on higher ground and then hopped onto his motorcycle with siren blaring, set off to alert as many as he could by going to every third house, waking the inhabitants and ordering them to get their neighbors and move to safety. He kept at it until three feet of water swept him off the bike. Stanley Baker did the same – because of their efforts, Santa Paula only suffered 16 known casualties in the flood, although many homes in low lying areas were wrecked by the flood, including Thornton Edwards’.
The massive surge of water, still moving at an estimated 6 miles per hour emptied out into the Pacific Ocean at 5:30 in the morning. Bodies of victims were pulled from the ocean for days, some floating as far south as the Mexican border. Others were buried deep, and only discovered as late as the 1990s, when construction excavation unearthed two victims near Castaic Junction. The bodies Tony Harnishfeger and his son were never found at all. Eventually the human toll stood at 431, although revised estimates postulate as many as 600; it was a rural area, farm country, with many itinerant and undocumented farm workers and ordinary hoboes; no registered address, no telephone, no one noticing if a little camp by the river or under a bridge, with a dozen people living in it was gone when the flood swept through.
Of course, the flood made all the newspapers; it was the early twentieth century, with all the technological advances. At the time, this was the worst disaster to hit California since the San Francisco Earthquake – and it seemed as if it could have been, should have been prevented. The public, especially those who had their homes and livelihoods wrecked, and those who lived downstream from other planned reservoirs, demanded answers. Civil authorities, from the governor on down obliged with a series of hearings scheduled almost immediately in the wake of the disaster. Naturally, William Mulholland and his department were questioned about everything to do with construction of the St. Francis dam. Most unusually for an executive-level bureaucrat in any modern time, Mulholland publicly accepted full responsibility for the disaster; he refused to shift blame for the failure to anyone or anything else. He and his department escaped criminal culpability, as no one at the time could have known about the geological instability in San Francisquito Canyon until the dam itself collapsed – but the loss of life in the collapse appears to have weighed dreadfully on him, at least as much as the monumental failure of one of his grand projects. He retired from his position at the end of the year. and died in 1935; a semi-recluse at the end of his life.
Chunks of concrete from the dam are still strewn across the bottom of San Francisquito Canyon. The center portion, which remained standing, was demolished after a sightseer fell off of it and died a year later.