Floodpath

by Jon Wilkman

  Like so many others, Thelma was enveloped by something cold, damp, dark, and fast moving. Beneath her, a bed of debris swept along like a manic flying carpet. On the shoreline, headlights from an automobile blurred past and reflected off the floodwaters. Screams and calls for help grew louder and faded. Everything was in motion as the young girl lost a sense of time and place.

  Although they were close in age, fifteen-year-old Doris Navarro didn’t know Thelma McCawley, but the St. Francis flood would introduce Doris to another neighbor she’d never met. The oldest child in a large Mexican-American family, Navarro lived in a farmhouse near the river with her widowed father, John, and five younger brothers and sisters. As Doris anxiously listened to “the rustling sound of the water coming,” her father quickly gathered the children and told them to stay together and hold hands. There was no time to lose. Cradling the youngest, only two years old, in one arm, he pulled the family into the night. “We were just crying and running and holding hands, and dragging the little ones along, because they couldn’t keep up with us,” Doris remembered.26

  Thirteen-year-old Thelma McCawley with her mother, Helen (Thelma McCawley Shaw)

  Lost in the dark, they stumbled across rough terrain, through orchards and over plowed farmland fenced with barbed wire. Unable to see more than a few feet ahead, the entire family blindly tumbled into an irrigation ditch. The sound of the flood was close behind. Doris felt water rising around her ankles as she helped her father lift the younger ones to the other side, and then struggled to climb free. Just as the family escaped, she heard a loud thump as the leading rush of the flood dropped into the ditch. Ahead, she could see a farmhouse on higher ground. Still holding hands, the family ran into the backyard and shouted for help.

  Inside, fourteen-year-old Paul Morris heard the commotion. “They knocked on the back door real loud and said a tidal wave was coming from the beach. My father said, ‘Oh, no, I bet the dam broke!’ He knew the farmers were suing Los Angeles about losing water … We took the family in the house immediately … We had a woodstove in the kitchen and my mother got a hot fire going and fixed up a bath because they were all covered with blood and scratches. We got them some dry clothes too.”27 Paul and Doris went to the same school, but in separate classrooms. This was the first time they met.

  The Navarro family was safe, but eight and a half miles downstream, more than seven thousand people in Santa Paula, the largest city in the Santa Clara River Valley, were next to face the onslaught of the St. Francis flood. By three A.M., telephone operator Louise Gipe and others had spread the news. The Union Oil whistle continued to wail and local police officers were rushing through the streets with sirens blaring. But for many in isolated areas near the riverbed, the floodwaters threatened to outrace the warnings.

  The first mud and debris had yet to arrive when Santa Paula motorcycle patrol officer Thornton Edwards decided he had done as much as he could in the sparsely populated lowlands by the river. He turned the handlebars of his Indian 4 motorbike and headed toward downtown. Racing at top speed in the dark, there was no time to stop when a twenty-foot-high wall of water appeared from nowhere. Edwards was face-to-face with the St. Francis flood. He hit the wave, swerved, skidded, and barely escaped. Soaked to the skin and covered with mud, the patrolman revved his engine and continued into town. He had almost drowned, but his first response was relief that he hadn’t lost his new $500 motorcycle.

  Santa Paula motorcycle patrolman Thornton Edwards (Santa Paula Historical Society)

  It took more than three hours for the floodwaters to arrive in Santa Paula. The wreckage of the upstream Bardsdale Bridge added destructive force to a battering ram of rocks, mud, debris, and mangled bodies. The Willard Bridge, an important Valley transportation link, was dead ahead. As the flood approached, twenty-eight-year-old Ralph Bennett was watching—he thought from a safe distance. “Finally, all the debris and stuff … made a dam of it,” Bennett remembered. “And the water started running our way. I never run faster in my life.”28 Wave after wave pounded the eight-year-old bridge. Finally, the entire center span gave way, leaving only two steel-and-wood approaches. In the crash of shattered wood and the sound of steel bent to the breaking point, Bennett heard a loud hiss. A twelve-inch gas line had broken. It wasn’t the first or last.

  Santa Paula old-timers remembered a terrible flood eighteen years before. That deluge was nothing like this. City officials knew they needed help. They were doubtful but desperate when they turned to seventeen-year-old Charles Primmer, son of the Santa Paula fire chief. With electricity out, and many phone and telegraph lines down, could the teenager get through to Red Cross headquarters in San Francisco? “Sure I can,” young Primmer replied. “It won’t take long.” He hunched over his battery-powered amateur radio transmitter—station 6-BYQ—and clicked a wireless message. The signal was picked up by a high school radio instructor in Oakland. A telephone call for immediate assistance was delivered to the Red Cross in San Francisco.29 Two hours later, doctors and nurses were on their way from Los Angeles. Primmer was modest about his early-morning heroics. “Why that was nothing,” he said. “Anybody that is a radio fan could do the same thing.”30

  Three hours before, in Manuel Reyes’s downtown Santa Paula office, the editor and sole staff member of the weekly Spanish language newspaper La Voz de la Colonia was typing at the keyboard of a large Intertype press machine, preparing the next edition, when the lights went out. Annoyed by the interruption, the newspaperman sat in the dark, waiting for power to resume. Police sirens alerted him that something newsworthy was in the works. When he learned a massive flood was on the way, Reyes decided his scoop would have to wait. A passing squad car provided a ride to his riverside house. There was just enough time to rescue his family and warn neighbors before his home and everything he owned were swept away.31 In the weeks ahead, the relieved newspaperman knew there would be many such stories to tell, especially among Santa Paula’s Spanish-speaking community, which was only occasionally covered in the pages of the Anglo-oriented Santa Paula Chronicle.

  Like Manuel Reyes, a large portion of the Santa Clara River Valley’s Mexican-American population lived between the Southern Pacific railroad tracks and the river. Margaret Moreno’s multigenerational family had a modest house in Spanish Town, surrounded by citrus groves. Later, her usually stoic father would cry when he remembered the Inundación de St. Francis.

  The barking of the family dog was the only warning. “Everyone just grabbed for each other,” Margaret remembered. “My father had ahold of his nephew, just four or five years old, but things were just beating on him, trees and rocks, and he couldn’t hold on … When the water passed, he was overwhelmed with emotion. He thought his nephew was gone. He was shouting and frantic. And then he heard this little voice, and he could see the little boy, his little chin up on a piece of wood, and he was saying, ‘¡Aqui estoy! ¡Aqui estoy, tio!’ ‘Here I am! Here I am, uncle!’ And my dad said that he felt like his life came back to him.”32

  Somehow, the entire Moreno family survived, including the grandparents. “My grandfather was a pistol,” Margaret remembered. “He grabbed my grandmother by the hair—she had very long hair—and he kept her above the water … He came out of the flood naked as a jaybird and there were oranges floating all around. He started eating one and told my grandmother, ‘Take one. They’re sweet.’ They had almost died, and she thought he was crazy … They had been carried all the way to the town of El Rio, miles away. Río means river, you know. The flood seemed to know to go there.”33

  Mrs. Pearl Barnard was a popular Sunday-school teacher and devout Christian. The flood couldn’t shake her faith. “It sounded like hail and thunderbolts and a great earthquake shaking the house … When I got out I was gripped by the flood and swirling around like a ball … My mouth filled with water and debris and I was gasping for breath. As I came up, I clasped my hands and looked up saying, ‘Oh God, I am drowning. I do not want to lose my faith in Thee, and I want to die a C
hristian.’” Mrs. Barnard found herself floating on a mattress. “Some object ran into my lap … [It was] a little white chicken. [It] stayed by my side all night, going down the river … I prayed and the more I prayed the less chilly I felt … I wondered how all my dear neighbors were, and thought of my loved ones and friends, but most of all, Daniel’s God who could deliver me, and I felt I was safe.”34

  Prayers couldn’t save Rose Samaniego’s father, Santana, but the nineteen-year-old grabbed her mother, Matilde, as they were carried off. Holding her parent tight, she fought the torrent for two hours. Finally, the water released them and Rose stumbled to safety, with her mother still cradled in her arms. She looked down, relieved to have survived. The old woman was dead.

  As the deluge rolled toward the Pacific Ocean, it was two miles wide. It slowed to seven miles per hour but retained plenty of destructive power. In Santa Paula, most of the damage, and all of the dead, were below Main Street, but fourteen houses floated lazily around the two-story Isbell School, a block from downtown. Inside one of the houses, candlesticks, set out after the power outage, remained upright on an undamaged phonograph.35

  The St. Francis flood passed Santa Paula, nearing the end of a fifty-four-mile journey to the sea. There would be more damage to inflict, lives to cut short, and heroes to emerge. An afterthought saved eight-year-old Lois Clemore and her father, Vincent, mother, Mary Ellen, and four-year-old sister. The family had arrived only recently from the Missouri Ozarks, in search of the California Dream. There was no phone in their simple farmhouse near the river. The news came from an escaping neighbor, who was about to pass by when he returned to warn them. Believing it was “nothing but the rain,” Vincent refused to leave, but his pregnant wife gathered the girls in the family Studebaker and drove toward the town of Ventura.36

  As soon as they left, Lois’s father had second thoughts. He ran toward the nearby Saticoy Bridge just as the flood closed in. Only a short time before, a local rancher had rousted a camp of nineteen “bindlestiffs,” encamped in a well-known hobo jungle beneath the bridge. All but one escaped.37 No one knew how many similar encampments, and unknown victims, were underwater upstream.

  When Clemore arrived at the Saticoy Bridge, he saw a car stalled halfway across. Inside, terrified passengers were uncertain what to do. It took all his strength, but he was able to push the automobile to safety just as the flood topped the bridge and poured over the other side, taking half of the structure with it.

  It was shortly after four A.M. The agricultural town of El Rio, and another set of bridges at the town of Montalvo, were a little more than four miles away. When the Sheriff came to warn the family of fourteen-year-old Nazarene Donlon, she could see the flood in the distance and smell it. It was approaching “in great white waves,” but the first thing Nazarene and her sister thought to do was run upstairs and make their bed. “Afterwards we said, ‘How foolish! Who was going to go up and see if the bed was made? … My mother grabbed an old dress that had a hole in the front of it, and I said ‘Mama what good is that dress?’ She said, ‘I don’t know what I was doing.’”38 The family escaped just before their house was inundated.

  In El Rio, seventy-seven-year-old E.K. Eaton saved a group of sleeping oil drillers who had no idea what was happening. They described the sound of the flood as “a blown oil well,” “a stinking roar,” and “a gusher.”39 Deputy Sheriff Eddie Hearn had warned the residents of nearby Oxnard two hours before. Fortunately, the town escaped the brunt of the flood. In Montalvo, an old bridge, built in 1898, served automobile traffic along California Highway 101, which paralleled the Pacific Ocean. Beside it, a Southern Pacific Railway crossing carried the SP’s scenic Coast Line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Locomotive engineers had already been warned to halt their trains in Ventura to the north and Oxnard to the south. At the bridge, a highway patrolman was on duty to stop automobile traffic.

  There was no sign of a flood when a bus driver, concerned that he was falling behind schedule, attempted to convince the officer to let his vehicle, with travelers inside, pass. They were still arguing when a five-foot-high flood surge hit. When the bridge was hit, a clock recorder captured the time: five A.M. The old structure was pounded hard but refused to submit as the bus driver watched with a mix of awe and relief. The Montalvo crossing survived to provide rescue workers vital access to Highway 126 into the devastated Santa Clara River Valley.

  Around 5:25 A.M. on March 13, nearly five and half hours after the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, the leading edge of what had been 12.4 billion gallons of water slipped into the surf between the towns of Oxnard and Ventura. Under an overcast early-morning sky, a dark stain, slick with oil and clotted by debris, spread from the beach and oozed into the Pacific.

  A washed-away section of Highway 126 in the Santa Clara River Valley (Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society)

  A panorama of devastation at the site of the St. Francis Dam (Ventura County Museum of History and Art)

  7.

  The Dead Zone

  When daylight returned on March 13, 1928, a heavy fog filled San Francisquito Canyon. Distant shouts echoed against the murmur of slow-moving water. At the dam site, there was mostly silence until the labored grind of engines, straining over uneven terrain, grew louder. A dark touring car accompanied by heavy trucks came to a stop where the road abruptly ended. Waiting with a small group of workers from the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light, engineer C. Clarke Keely watched as William Mulholland and Harvey Van Norman climbed from the car and surveyed the scene. The Chief “stood there with a cane, and he was just shaking,” Keely remembered.1 When Mulholland and Van Norman returned to the dam site two days later, a Los Angeles Examiner newspaper photographer lifted his Speed Graphic and snapped a photo. The legendary engineer looked grim, stunned, and very old.

  On the morning of March 12, Mulholland and Van Norman had stood near here with dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger, evaluating a new leak in the face of the St. Francis Dam. Today, as the Chief surveyed what remained, a few yards away a wooden sign, which had somehow survived, boasted that the capacity of the St. Francis Reservoir was 38,000 acre-feet—all of it “Reserve Storage for the City of LA.” Now the water was gone and the canyon where a 208-foot-tall concrete wall once stood looked like an open wound.

  A single center section stood alone. “A monstrous tombstone,” newspaper reports called it.”2 A dark stain marked the height where more than fifty-one million tons of water once pressed.3 East of the monolith, a massive landslide slumped into a heap of stair-stepped fragments, the remains of a portion of more than 134,000 cubic yards of concrete.4 On the west, the hillside looked like a raw red gash. From the wing dike to the dam’s foundation, concrete had been snapped clean. Below the Tombstone, streams meandered through yellow silt and collected in shallow pools. In the distance, more than a mile away, giant chunks of the St. Francis Dam were strewn like shattered dice along the canyon floor.

  William Mulholland (left) and Harvey Van Norman view the ruins of the St. Francis Dam March 15, 1928 (Los Angeles Examiner)

  On March 13, San Francisquito Canyon was a mud-shrouded graveyard. Earlier in the morning signs of life returned. Hours before, when the flood roared over Powerhouse 2, Lillian Curtis huddled on a hillside with her son, Danny, and the family dog. After repeatedly calling for her husband and two daughters, she finally heard a response. It came from her neighbor, Ray Rising, a short distance away. Of the sixty-seven men, women, and children who lived in the community beside the powerhouse, only three survived.

  When daylight came, a rescue party found Ray, Lillian, and Danny. They were immediately wrapped in blankets and led to E.H. Thomas’s cabin on the hill beside the surge chamber. Later in the day, Lillian’s parents arrived to take her home. Her brother, Ivan Dorsett, was with them. “She had the little boy that she had carried up the mountainside,” he remembered. “I opened the door of the car and took her in my arms … And that’s when she just broke down in tears, and she was
crying so hard. And she was just saying, ‘Ivan, this is all that’s left of my family.’”5

  Looking downstream from the Tombstone. Evidence of landslides on the left (east) abutment and the remains of the wing dike on the right (west) abutment. (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)

  C. Clarke Keely was one of the searchers who found Lillian, Danny, and Ray Rising. Afterward, he ventured farther down the canyon. “A few bodies were lying around in the rocks. One I’ll never forget was a little boy half-buried in the sand, and he had a school bag over his shoulder with books in it. I guess he thought of his school books when he was awakened by the rush of water.”6 The little victim might have been a student at the Bee School. His teacher, Ida Parker, and all her students were dead, many of the bodies found later in the mud near Castaic.

  The night of the collapse, survivor Chester Smith was concerned about the safety of the St. Francis Dam and had decided to sleep in a barn with the door open. His brother-in-law Hugh Nichols and Nichols’s wife, Mary, had survived, but their neighbors were dead. “We were able to walk across that stream,” Smith recalled. “Some officers came along, hollered at us to work our way south. We didn’t have any shoes or clothes when we started out … Mrs. Nichols couldn’t walk, because her feet hurt too bad. Mine were bleeding, but I could walk in the soft dirt.”7

  Powerhouse 2 survivors Lillian Curtis and her son, Danny, a short time after the St. Francis flood (Ivan Dorsett)

  Farther downstream, the remains of the Ruiz homestead were half hidden in silt. Eight family members and relatives who lived nearby were missing. Their mangled bodies were recovered miles away in Fillmore and Santa Paula. Near the devastated Raggio ranch, the one-room San Francisquito schoolhouse was gone. The wreckage from the building was found on the outskirts of Santa Paula.8 Mrs. Cecelia Small and ten of her pupils were added to the growing death count.