Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles

by Standiford, Les

  It was quickly obvious to Mulholland that his prayer had been a hopeless one. Nearly everyone who had been in the canyon or anywhere close to the stream beds of San Francisquito Creek and its junction with the Santa Clara River had died, and the bodies that could be found were already being carried to temporary morgues at Saugus, Newhall, Fillmore, Piru, and other communities that lay near the route of the water’s fifty-five-mile rush down the river valley to the sea. According to a coroner on the scene, the majority of the victims he’d seen had not been drowned but crushed by cascading boulders or flood-driven timbers and pieces of machinery.

  One employee at Power Plant #2, Lyman Curtis, was awakened by the rumble of the collapse and sensed what was coming. He shook his wife awake, thrust their three-year-old son Danny into her arms, and sent her scrambling into the nearby hills. Satisfied that she would be safe, Curtis turned and ran inside their cabin for the couple’s two daughters. Mrs. Curtis made her way to the top of a rise and paused to wait for her husband. She turned to see him hurrying out the door of the cabin below, the two children in tow. And then the waters covered everything. She never saw her husband or her other children again.

  Another woman, Ann Holzcloth, spoke to a reporter from a cot in an emergency hospital set up in the Santa Paula schoolhouse, more than forty miles downstream from the broken dam. She had been asleep in her home in the Santa Clara River Valley when, without warning, floodwaters slammed into the house and swept it from its foundations. “The baby was sleeping with me,” she said. “I clutched him tight as we were swept out on the water in the dark.”

  She managed to grab onto a floating timber from the wreckage of her house, Ms. Holzcoth said. “With my other arm, I held the baby out of the water the best I could. I know that he was alive when we hit a whirlpool.”

  In the next moment, she said, the swirling water wrenched the child from her grip and threw her in an opposite direction. “I landed on dry land,” she sobbed. “Why did I have to live?”

  Reporters described other horrors from the scene, including the “pitiful figure of a woman, huddled in a vivid red sweater, wringing her hands.” She identified herself as Mrs. Russell Hallen, and explained that her young daughter had been living in the San Francisquito Canyon with her grandmother. “Right over there,” she told a reporter, pointing to a place where a large cottonwood jutted from an otherwise flattened and featureless plane of silt. Not only were the tree’s leaves gone, but the bark had been stripped from its trunk and limbs, leaving it glistening like a fan of bones.

  A man wearing a long fur coat was spotted staggering through the mudflats by the still-running creek, tearing through clumps of debris calling out a pair of names in endless succession. He was Jimmy Errachow, the man said when a reporter stopped him for a moment, but he did not have time to talk. His wife and his baby were still missing and he had to find them.

  Thirteen-year-old Luis Rivera, who lived on a ranch downstream near Castaic, was awakened by the roar of the coming waters and woke his father. “The water is coming,” young Luis cried.

  “It is only the rain,” his father told him and went back to sleep. Luis was not pacified. He woke his younger sister and pulled her out of bed and into the hills despite her protests. They left behind their father, their mother, and an older brother, all of whom died in the flood.

  One hero on the scene was identified by workmen among those at the Southern California Edison tent camp set up at Piru, about twenty miles down the Santa Clara River from the dam site. A man named Locke, the camp watchman, had seen what was hurtling down the river bed toward them and raised the alarm. He ran from tent to tent, calling on the sleeping workmen to flee. “I got out because of Locke,” one of them said. “He was still running from tent to tent when the water took him away.” In all, 84 of the 177 men in the camp were killed, but it was agreed that had it not been for Locke’s efforts, the toll would have been even worse.

  A letter to Catherine Mulholland from Daisy Orton, a family friend living with her husband in Fillmore, about forty miles downstream from the dam, lends some sense of the fear and confusion among the residents the night of the collapse: “The fire bell at 2 o’clock woke us & we could keep hearing an awful roar,” Ms. Orton said. Though the Ortons were warned that they would have to flee, the water rushing through Fillmore crested in the block just below their home. “We didn’t go back to bed,” she said, “but built a fire in the fireplace and stayed up. It was sure a terrible night and I don’t believe I will ever forget that awful roar of the water. Who would ever have thot that such a calamity could have overtaken us here.”

  In the aftermath, Ms. Orton described the difficulties in moving relief and rescue workers onto the scene owing to the collapse of bridges and highways. “The river is absolutely clean of trees,” she said, and all the houses close to its bed had been destroyed or taken off their foundations. Her husband, Luce, was gone for the next two days and nights with search parties looking for victims. They had found fifty at the time of her writing on March 14, “not drowned—but battered and bruised—but don’t show anguish—so that probably they were taken in their sleep and didn’t know what had happened.” Ms. Orton added that there appeared to be plenty of outside aid coming in, “and as far as we can hear—everything is being done that can possibly be done.”

  Given that census statistics were not then what they are today, a precise death toll has never been firmly established, though it is generally agreed that somewhere between 400 and 600 people died in the disaster. Twenty families were completely wiped out. The only dam collapse that took more American lives was the epic failure of the South Fork Dam and resultant Johnstown Flood of 1889, which killed more than 2,000. Combined with the destruction of roads, bridges, buildings, and as many as 1,000 homes, the loss in both lives and property (estimates ranged from $15 million to $50 million), the St. Francis Dam collapse is considered to be among the worst civil engineering disasters in US history and ranks behind only the San Francisco earthquake and fire among the catastrophes that have struck the state.

  As to relief efforts, most work centered on restoring roads, rail lines, and utilities. There were few injured, as it turned out, for victims had either been killed or escaped without harm. As one pilot who flew over the scene remarked, “No rescue work is needed, but you will have to hunt for bodies.”

  The efforts of local civic and veterans organizations were reported as exemplary as were those of national organizations such as the Red Cross. Three hundred city policemen were dispatched to the region to help maintain order, the Safeway grocery chain began daily shipments of 2,000 loaves of bread to field kitchens, and President Coolidge pledged to send troops and aid in Red Cross efforts.

  On March 19, the City Council, prompted by recommendations from Water and Power commissioners, approved an immediate appropriation of $1 million to compensate victims of the tragedy and established a joint committee to review claims. According to the committee’s report, about $915,000 in death and injury claims were paid out by July of the following year. By March 24, the city had also arranged with the General Contractors Association of Los Angeles to oversee the cleanup and rebuilding of homes in the area, and within two days, 1,600 workmen and 95 pieces of heavy equipment were at work there.

  With the immediate shock beginning to lift, attention turned to questions as to the cause of the disaster. Elwood Mead, chief of the US Bureau of Reclamation, was appointed by the City Council to head a board of inquiry, and Governor Young ordered the state’s director of public works to name a board of investigating engineers. Los Angeles District Attorney Asa Keyes also announced a criminal investigation into the matter that would begin with an inquest by the coroner.

  Speculation was immediate that the composition of the rock on the opposing canyon walls abutting the dam was to blame. “Undoubtedly that is what caused the St. Francis Dam to break,” said Ventura County chief engineer Charles Petit. “The decomposed rock at the sides, weakened by the water, gave way
, and then the structure went out.” Other Ventura County officials, though admitting they were not geologists or engineers, chimed in, claiming that even a layman could see that this rock was unsound and could be reduced to pulp when mixed with water.

  For his part, Mulholland speculated that a landslide just above the dam might have caused the disaster. “Something terrific happened to break that huge mass of concrete into bits,” he said. In the end, his words would prove prescient though not exactly in the way the Chief had intended.

  As relief and rebuilding efforts continued in the Santa Clara Valley, where about 1,500 remained housed in tent cities, Mulholland appeared before the Board of Water and Power Commissioners to make a special request. As his presence might cause an embarrassment to the department until the investigations were completed, perhaps it would be best for him to take a leave of absence, the forty-year veteran of the water works said. The request, said reporters, brought tears from members of the board, most of whom had known Mulholland for many years. In the end, Mulholland’s request was denied. “The board hereby declines to grant said request and urges the Chief to remain on the job he has so faithfully filled for half a century.”

  Though Mulholland would have been heartened by such shows of support, he was also well aware of the swell of countervailing views—such as that expressed by a sign erected in the front yard of one flood-damaged Ventura County home: “Kill Mulholland.”

  It was the first disaster involving any project overseen by Mulholland in a long and storied career. As he would say during his testimony, “I’ve built nineteen dams and have been consulted on nineteen more and this is the only one where anything went wrong.” Still, the toll on the man was evident at once to those around him. “Chief Engineer Mulholland was a pitiable figure” as he appeared before the Water and Power Commission on the afternoon following his inspection of the disaster site, a Los Angeles Times reporter noted. “His figure was bowed, his faced lined with worry and suffering, [and] his voice was broken,” the piece continued, concluding with the observation, “The tragedy of the people in the canyon and the Santa Clara Valley is the tragedy of William Mulholland.”

  In a 1988 interview with Catherine Mulholland, a secretary in the DWP legal department, Lillian Darrow, recalled Mulholland as having been before the disaster “such a sweet man.” But immediately afterward, Darrow says, “He went down. His face aged twenty years.”

  On March 21, the coroner’s inquest began, with more than forty witnesses called for the purpose of determining any criminal behavior in the matter of the dam’s collapse. At the same time, the investigations of Elwood Mead and the Young Commission got underway, with the charge of determining the engineering flaws or causes attendant to the failure.

  At the inquest, the seventy-two-year-old Mulholland’s approach to the stand was described as “feeble,” and questioning had hardly begun when he broke in with the remark, “On an occasion like this, I envy the dead.”

  When examination by the district attorney resumed, Mulholland carefully recounted his visit to the dam site on the morning prior to the disaster and reasserted his belief that nothing he saw that day was out of the ordinary. All dams leak, he insisted, but the St. Francis Dam leaked less than most. Nor, he said, counteracting rumors to the contrary, was there long-standing suspicion of dangers with the structure among any employees of the water department. “Had I such a suspicion or the slightest idea of the kind,” Mulholland said, “I would have sent a Paul Revere down that valley. It never occurred to me that it was in danger.” As engineer Clark Keely would recall many years later, he and a number of his coworkers from Power Plant #1 had in fact picnicked atop the dam the very day of Mulholland’s visit.

  Mulholland also declared that the base and sides of the dam had been anchored sufficiently, with topsoil removed and trenches cut into bedrock to a depth of thirty feet in some places. Mulholland also dropped hints that he believed that sabotage of the sort that had plagued the aqueduct project in the Owens Valley over the past years might have been involved, though he would not say so directly. When the district attorney asked if he had any explanation for the dam’s failure, Mulholland said, “I have a suspicion, but it is a very serious thing to make a charge that I don’t even want to utter without having more to show for it.”

  Following a trip by the inquest’s jury to the dam site and the hearing of several other witnesses, Mulholland was recalled to the stand on March 27. As he was explaining that a number of holes had been bored in the abutting formations to be sure that water would not wash away the anchor points of the dam, Mulholland was interrupted by one member of the jury who wanted to know why he was so certain that his choice of a site for the St. Francis Dam was justifiable. Mulholland fixed his questioner with a stare. “I am willing to take my medicine like a man,” he said. “I have nothing to conceal and will be the first to help you in any way possible to determine the cause of this disaster.” Then, at the conclusion of his testimony, he uttered the words that essentially defused the entire inquiry. “Fasten it on me if there was any error of judgment, human judgment. I was the human.”

  Finally, on April 12, following consideration of reports by Mead and his consulting engineers, the jury rendered its verdict. The choice of the site for the St. Francis Dam was ill advised, the panel concluded, primarily because the nature of the foundation material at the west abutment of the dam was faulty. That material was subject to saturation by the impounded water and over time had begun to decompose at the place where the west wall of the dam was anchored. It was the west wall of the dam that had first given way, the jurors concluded, leading to the collapse of the rest, although Mead had identified issues with the east wall as well. Though that wall had appeared to be sound, it was in fact a mica schist formation, as prone to fracture as the gneiss rock Mulholland was once so happy to encounter in the tunnel below Lake Elizabeth.

  The coroner reported that there were in fact two errors in judgment that had resulted in the dam’s failure: The first was essentially Mulholland’s, owing to “the very poor quality of the underlying rock structure upon which (the dam) was built and to the fact that the design of the dam was not suited to inferior foundation conditions.” The second was more the fault of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners, for their lack of good judgment. It might have been understandable, given Mulholland’s exemplary record of achievement, but Mulholland in truth had little practical experience in building concrete gravity dams, other than the Hollywood Dam in Weid Canyon. The board had thereby erred in allowing so great a responsibility to rest solely on one man.

  More significantly, the jury had found “no evidence of criminal act or intent on the part of the board of waterworks and supply or any engineer or employee in the construction or operation of the dam.” There would, as a result of these findings, “be no criminal prosecution of any of the above by the District Attorney.”

  FORGET IT, JAKE. IT’S CHINATOWN

  FAMILY MEMBERS SAY THAT MULHOLLAND MAY HAVE felt only a grudging appreciation for the coroner’s determination not to recommend that criminal charges be filed. In a 1978 interview with Catherine Mulholland, the Chief’s nephew and namesake William Bodine Mulholland said that while his uncle appreciated the explanations offered by Elwood Mead and others for the failure of the St. Francis Dam, he was never convinced by them. “He had as much knowledge of those kinds of things as anybody in the world, and he used every bit,” the younger William said, insisting that his uncle remained ever uncertain of the reasons for the dam’s failure. Somehow, the dam just “didn’t stay there.”

  It would become a commonplace that Mulholland was forever crushed by guilt over the collapse of the St. Francis Dam. George Bejar, the Chief’s longtime driver, described some years later the toll the disaster had taken on his boss. “If I could only sleep at night,” the weary Mulholland told Bejar as the inquest dragged on.

  “It was that damned dam that killed him,” said Bejar, whose recollections of Mulholland’
s later years range from the comic to the tender. “He never lost his sense of humor altogether,” Bejar said, “but he did timid it down a little.” Once, said Bejar, during a trip to Pendleton, Oregon, on some dam-consulting business, they stopped at a local restaurant. Informed by the waitress that the special of the day was “codfish balls,” Mulholland nodded sagely. “That is the best part of the fish,” he replied. Bejar also recalls being the only person the proud Chief would permit to give him a hand when his age-related palsy began to worsen. “He’d lean out over the rail to check something way down the face of a dam, shaking so bad I worried he’d go on over,” Bejar said. “I’d grab his coattail and he’d give me a dirty look, but he let me do it. If a stranger tried to lend a hand, though, he’d yank right away.”

  Nephew William contended that Mulholland was not broken by the dam’s failure, however. His uncle was indeed saddened, and he acted with great bravery and compassion when he asked that blame for the tragedy be fastened on him. But, William said, “He was not broken by that mishap because he never accepted the responsibility of something that was beyond his power.”

  Arguments persist as to whether Mulholland should have known better when he chose the St. Francis site. The well-received Man-Made Disaster, published in 1963 by Santa Clara Valley rancher and self-taught historian Charles Outland, hardly exonerated Mulholland, but in synthesizing the several reports on the disaster, Outland concluded that, in fact, the collapse had actually begun on the east side of the dam where the rock appeared more stable.

  This view was elaborated upon by geologist and civil engineer J. David Rogers in a lengthy 1995 article published by the Southern California Historical Society. Rogers suggested that not only was Outland likely correct in pinpointing the actual locus of the dam’s failure, but that owing to limitations of geological science of the time, Mulholland could not have appreciated the tenuous makeup of the substrata at the dam site. At the time of Rogers’s writing, he said, it had become common knowledge among geologists that ancient landslides had once blocked the narrows of San Francisquito Canyon with insubstantial deposits that the creek had eventually worn through (much as the Owens River had once sawed its way down to China Lake). Modern engineers might better understand the nature of these ancient deposits, as well as the complicated physics of “uplift,” and might be better prepared to predict that a concrete dam of the nature Mulholland built was likely to fail, Rogers wrote. But, Rogers concluded, Mulholland could not have fully comprehended these factors at the time, even though, ironically, the Chief at first theorized that “earthquakes” had been the cause of the disaster.