by Jon Wilkman
Counting the dead and caring for the victims of the St. Francis Dam disaster were local concerns, but reports of long lists of missing and unidentified bodies that appeared in newspapers throughout the United States, and even the world, produced a surprisingly personal glimpse of life in late-1920s America.
After the St. Francis flood, hundreds of letters arrived in Los Angeles and Ventura inquiring about missing family members and relatives. The correspondence came typed on official stationery, in telegrams, and on handwritten notes and postcards, sharing stories of abandoned wives, wayward children, restless friends, and lost vacationers. Detailed physical descriptions were often included, with attached snapshots. More than a few communications were insurance related. DWP staff responded to them all.
With the geography of California terra incognita to many, desperate inquiries arrived about missing loved ones who were last heard from in places miles from the floodpath. In one case, great distances and unfamiliar territory were used as an advantage. An abandoned wife wrote that she received a letter from a stranger saying her husband had asked him to mail it on the day before the flood. In the letter, the missing spouse said he was working on the St. Francis Dam. At first the wife believed he might have perished, but the DWP found no record of his employment. Without further information, the abandoned bride was left to wonder if the questionable correspondence was somehow true, or part of her husband’s attempt to fake a disappearance. An even more cynical explanation might be that the wife had written the letter herself in order to claim joint property or collect from an insurance policy.
Another missing person had in fact worked on the dam, but a DWP investigation showed he left town days before the flood. He had taken a job as a truck driver, carrying supplies for a cross-country footrace known as “the Bunion Derby.” “He’s probably safely somewhere in Arizona,” the investigator wrote to the frantic mother. Another message came from a foreign consulate, inquiring on behalf of a woman in Yugoslavia whose son worked for Southern California Edison. In this case, the response wasn’t reassuring. The mother was told her son had been caught in the floodpath and was dead.
One of the most moving letters hadn’t traveled far. It came from a survivor now living in Santa Ana, south of Los Angeles. On April 10, 1928, Mrs. Ethel Holsclaw, the young woman whose baby had been torn from her arms by the floodwaters, sent a four-page handwritten note to William Mulholland, pleading for him to provide “funds for men and tractors” to continue the search for the body of her six-month-old child. “You no doubt are a kind and loving father,” she wrote, “do you remember when your children were babies? … In God’s name remember them and then think of me, my empty arms, my broken heart and the long and lonely days and nights ahead of me.” The letter was forwarded to Mulholland’s daughter Rose, who chose not to show it to her father. In a response, over the Chief’s signature, a DWP representative wrote that the Department was doing “everything humanly possible to recover all the bodies.”53
In many cases, responding to even less emotional inquiries, there was little to report. Correspondents were informed that the name of their relative or loved one didn’t appear on official death and missing lists. But that didn’t mean they weren’t victims of the flood. There was too much mud and uncertainty for a completely accurate death count. As days and weeks passed, the time for searching came to an end, and restoration and rebuilding activities accelerated. Despite this, urgent questions remained: what caused the St. Francis Dam to collapse, and, most important, who, if anyone, was responsible?
9.
Arguing Over the Ruins
The aftermath of the St. Francis Dam disaster brought a rush of overlapping reactions. To distant observers and survivors alike, the flurry of activity seemed as overwhelming as the flood itself. Everyone appeared to be eager to resolve the situation and put the catastrophe in the past as quickly as possible. A few wondered: was this haste a matter of compassion, justice, and economy, or was there something to hide?
As heavy equipment and an army of workers dug, shoveled, and hauled away tons of wreckage from ravaged farmland and orchards, reconstruction camps were crowded with activity. Most residents of the Valley were pleased to see progress, but anger and resentment remained. Search-and-recovery volunteers accused imported Los Angeles police officers of interfering with rather than assisting with the work. When the lawmen were supposed to be shooting half-dead animals, residents complained the cops took potshots for fun. An old lady grumbled, “I wish they’d get rid of these Los Angeles police. I heard they drink.”1
Despite these and other complaints, rebuilding efforts moved relatively quickly. Laborer Odilon Casas and his wife and three children were flood survivors, pulled to safety by the family’s mules. By March 18, Casas was hard at work untangling the twisted steel that was once the Southern Pacific Railway Bridge near Castaic Junction. “Funny thing about that bridge,” he said. “I helped build her. Now I need to work to help build her again.”2
As time passed, there were fewer funerals and memorial church services, but claim forms needed to be submitted before the September 12 deadline. In Santa Paula, the first floor of the Isbell Middle School had been cleared of mud, but across the silt-covered front lawn, barren foundations were all that remained of a few nearby homes. Main Street, which was safely above the waterline, looked much as it had before. But there was more to do, even as immediate memories of the St. Francis flood were receding into the safe distance of history.
The Mission Theater was selling seats for ten and twenty cents to see the latest from Hollywood, Don’t Tell the Wife. As a special added attraction, the marquee touted: THE FLOOD PICTURES: AIRPLANE VIEW OF THE DAM AND FLOODED AREA. A WONDERFUL VIEW FROM THE AIR! DON’T MISS THEM! Waters of Death also was on the bill, the most recent installment of a serial adventure. “We shall see whether this calamity had deprived the screen of one its best chapter play heroes,” the ad copy promised.3 Up the street, the owners of Tozier’s Drug Store advertised one-day service for those whose cameras hadn’t been swept away: LET US DEVELOP AND PRINT YOUR FLOOD PICTURES FOR YOU, they offered.4
Downtown Los Angeles, sixty-five miles to the southeast, was far from the stench of death and decay that accompanied the St. Francis Dam floodpath from San Francisquito Canyon to the debris-strewn beach between Oxnard and Ventura. But images of the Tombstone haunted newspaper headlines. On March 16, the front page of the Los Angeles Times featured a large drawing of the water-stained monolith, with a one-word caption: “Why?”
Responses to that pressing question included cautious official statements, tentative speculation, rumors, and inflammatory accusations, but few established facts. Public officials stepped in to try to calm an immediate demand for answers and action. California’s Republican Governor, Clement Calhoun (C.C.) Young, personified the fading influence of the state’s turn-of-the-century Progressive movement. A native of New Hampshire, Young came to San Francisco in the 1890s. His first career was as a high school English teacher, during which he coauthored an English poetry textbook. An ardent conservationist in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, in 1908 the educator-activist entered politics in the California Assembly. He supported the municipal reform movement and public control over water and power resources. Young’s landslide victory in 1927 was a decisive but temporary defeat for the more free-market Republicanism that was reemerging in California politics. The collapse of the St. Francis Dam accelerated this conservative trend.
A billboard for low-budget producer Nat Fisher’s film, released within weeks of the disaster (Author’s collection)
Governor Young was in San Diego when news of the disaster broke. He commandeered a police patrol car and rushed to the Santa Clara River Valley, where he expressed his condolences and offered the resources of the state government. Young’s formal statement was careful: “The prosperity of California is largely tied up with the storage of flood waters. We must have reservoirs in which to store these waters if the State is to grow. We cannot have
reservoirs without dams. These dams must be made safe for the people living below them. Accordingly, our duty is a double one. We must learn, if it is possible, what caused the failure of the St. Francis Dam; the lesson that it teaches must be incorporated into the construction of future dams.”5
Edward Hyatt Jr., California State Engineer, was the government official responsible for implementing Governor Young’s St. Francis Dam agenda. A California native, Hyatt had a degree in civil engineering from Stanford University and had been involved in water-rights issues since 1916, a period that spanned California’s Little Civil War in the Owens Valley.
Hyatt was appointed State Engineer in 1927, just in time to face troubling questions about the government’s role in the construction and collapse of the St. Francis Dam.6 Speaking to reporters, at first he was defensive. “According to our reports the dam was in perfect condition and had been inspected regularly under State supervision.”7 This was reassuring, but not exactly true. Hyatt’s predecessor, W.F. McClure, had visited the site in the early months of construction. Mulholland remembered that McClure stayed about a half a day. “[He] stumbled around there over the country, and never had a word to say about it.”8
Later, Hyatt became more critical. If anyone was responsible, he declared, it was the Los Angeles city engineering authorities who built the dam. He emphasized, “State and federal officials had nothing to do with the structure.”9
Shortly after the disaster, such definitive statements were uncommon if not impossible to make since they were first impressions without enough solid information to back them up. Within days of the failure, Ezra Scattergood, Chief of the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light, led a tour of San Francisquito Canyon and the dam site. The group included State Engineer Hyatt and a number of California water and power officials, engineering consultants, construction men, and the West Coast editor of a prominent engineering journal. F.E. Bonner, District Engineer with the National Forest Service, stared up at the Tombstone and walked beneath towering heaps of concrete. Afterward, he commented, “I don’t think the real cause for the collapse of St. Francis Dam will ever be satisfactorily determined.” He refused to elaborate.
The City of New York’s Chief Engineer for the Bureau of Water Supply seemed unconcerned, if not uninterested, in why a dam far from Times Square had failed. He reassured Gotham citizens: “There are a dozen big dams within 60 miles of New York City, some of them impounding two or three times the volume … of the St. Francis Dam. But they should cause no undue alarm …”10 An editorial in the New York Morning News was especially smug. Touting the size and strength of local dams, the paper declared, “New York State engineers did not have to learn their lesson from sad experience. From the first, they built for eternity.”11
Before midnight on March 12, 1928, William Mulholland’s reputation was respected and controversial but intact, and after years of conflict his war with the Owens Valley seemed to have ended in victory. The Watterson Brothers were in San Quentin, and confessed dynamiter Perry Sexton was scheduled to stand trial in an Inyo County courthouse. March 13 changed everything.
When asked to speculate about what happened, at first the Chief responded like an impartial observer, seemingly oblivious to legal or political implications. He theorized that an “investigation will prove, I believe, that there was an enormous earth movement preceding the flood.”12 He saw evidence of at least three landslides near the dam along the east side of the reservoir, suggesting that a mass of falling earth and rock could have raised the water level and dramatically increased the hydrostatic pressure against the dam, causing it to fail. Mulholland declined to speculate about what might have caused these landslides, but J.E. Phillips, Assistant Engineer for the Bureau of Water Works and Supply, had a theory: “Only through force supplied by dynamiters or an earthquake could this dam have gone out.”
Mulholland was well aware of earthquake dangers in San Francisquito Canyon. The dreaded San Andreas Fault cut across the Elizabeth Tunnel. As early as 1918, the Chief gave a speech to the American Institute of Mining Engineers. He described the Elizabeth Tunnel fault in detail, but admitted he didn’t have the funds to hire a qualified geologist to make an accurate map.13
In 1928, although the well-known Richter scale had yet to be developed, scientists were able to record earth movements, if not generically quantify them. The Seismological Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (soon to become part of the California Institute of Technology) monitored detectors in five recording stations arrayed throughout Southern California. Harry O. Wood, the geologist-seismologist in charge, reported that there had been no recorded earthquake activity during the night of March 12,14 and Dr. Perry Byerly, from the University of California, Berkeley, concurred. The Carnegie Institute sensors could detect earth movements caused by blasts of dynamite used in mining operations as far as 121 miles away, but Byerly qualified his conclusion about a possible shaker in San Francisquito Canyon:15 “There may have been a slight shock, however, which our instruments failed to detect.”
At first, it seemed everyone had a theory. State Engineer Hyatt received a letter that declared there was evidence that proved “beyond doubt” that the collapse was caused by “burrowing animals.”16 While technical experts lined up to join investigative committees and offer preliminary postmortems about the failure of the St. Francis Dam, it was revealed that a number of engineers had visited the site during construction, including the City Engineer of San Francisco, M.M. O’Shaughnessy. After the collapse, O’Shaughnessy suggested there were faults in the St. Francis Dam, and privately criticized Mulholland’s construction methods, but at the time of his visit to San Francisquito Canyon, before the St. Francis Dam was completed, he had nothing to say.
None of the other visiting engineers and geologists offered major criticism or sounded alarms at the time, with the exception of Mulholland’s antagonist since the early days of the Aqueduct, independent engineer Frederick Finkle. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Finkle announced that four years before the collapse, he knew the St. Francis Dam was dangerous.
In a report to the Santa Monica Anti-Annexation Committee dated September 8, 1924, Finkle concluded that the popular beach community had adequate water resources and didn’t need to be annexed to Los Angeles. To enhance his argument, he noted city plans for two new concrete dams: “in Weed [sic] and San Francisquito Canyons.” Finkle told the committee that both structures were situated on inadequate foundations and based on designs that were “defective.” “The failure of one or both of these dams will result in heavy damage to life and property,” the consulting engineer concluded, “and Santa Monica will have to pay its share if [it becomes] part of Los Angeles.”17 This was frightening news. But with so many lives at stake, apparently Finkle didn’t broadcast his warnings beyond the small circle of the Santa Monica Anti-Annexation Committee, or if he did, no one listened to such an obsessed critic of Mulholland and the Bureau of Water Works and Supply. In the Bureau’s defense, DWP representatives often belittled Finkle’s experience and expertise, pointing out that he wasn’t a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). In response, Finkle defended himself in a letter, claiming that because of his criticism of the Aqueduct he’d been blackballed by Mulholland’s allies and had decided to withdraw his ASCE membership application.18
In 1925, a far more credentialed expert offered the results of a cursory evaluation of the Chief’s new dam in San Francisquito Canyon. Respected civil engineer C.E. Grunsky visited the construction site at the time he was hired by the Santa Clara River Valley Protective Association to evaluate the effect of the St. Francis Dam on the water supply from San Francisquito Creek. In his report to the Association, Grunsky made a passing reference to excavations that were meant to anchor the dam into the canyon walls, and design measures to protect against leakage. The San Francisco engineer said that cuts into the abutments appeared to be shallow and didn’t extend very far up the canyon walls. He also described the unusual
geology at the site, but didn’t expand on his impressions or issue warnings.19
Dating from the first proposals for the Owens River Aqueduct, the editors of the Los Angeles Record had a less forgiving attitude toward William Mulholland and L.A.’s Water and Power Department. A short time after the flood, unwilling to wait for official investigations, the newspaper hired a technical consultant, B.F. Jakobsen, an independent Los Angeles engineer. Jakobsen said he had visited the dam site “a number of times” during construction. In a series of highly critical articles that included an itemized list of what he considered serious construction and design faults, accompanied by illustrations, Jakobsen declared his conviction that “this dam departed in several important respects from accepted American practice.” Before the failure, however, he admitted he had said nothing publicly about these serious deficiencies, because he “was not asked to approve it or disapprove it.”20
In a letter to Edward Hyatt, Jakobsen complimented the State Engineer for his strong stance concerning the St. Francis Dam. After sharing his engineering opinion, Jakobsen ended the letter with a friendly hint: “I have among my friends several close personal friends of Governor Young and worked myself on his campaign. If there is anything we [his firm] feel we can do to assist you, please feel free to call upon us.”21
Not all after-the-fact criticism came from reputable engineers who had earlier hesitated to speak. In 1927, as water filled the St. Francis Reservoir and cracks in the concrete appeared, Saugus had been a trading post for rumors. After the failure, men from San Francisquito Canyon and elsewhere told anyone who would listen how the Chief employed “low grade” rock and soil, simply shoveled from the valley floor, to make the concrete used to build the dam. Among the wilder tales were claims that bedsprings were tossed into the mix to provide cheap reinforcement.