Floodpath

by Jon Wilkman

  At seven P.M., a few spectators, including a reporter from the Los Angeles Times and a cinematographer from the Keystone Newsreel Service, watched from a safe distance. A shouted countdown began and the photographer cranked his movie camera. In a shelter 450 feet from the dam site, an explosives expert hunched over an electric detonator and pushed the plunger. “First, the concrete wall bulged outward,” the Times reporter wrote later. “Then came a rumbling explosion followed by an ear-shattering roar as the concrete split into huge jagged blocks and crashed into the gigantic grave.”20

  Demolition of the St. Francis Dam Tombstone, May 10, 1929 (Author’s collection)

  The final burial cost $15,000. There was no funeral or eulogy, but even dead, buried, and ignored, the impact of the failure of the St. Francis Dam would change Los Angeles, America, and even the world. Meanwhile, in the hills above the Hollywood movie capital, the Mulholland Dam and reservoir still loomed over hundreds of thousands of Angelenos, and there was much left to fix … and forget.

  14.

  Unfinished Business and Historical Amnesia

  On May 10, 1929, after nearly fifteen months of mourning, controversy, and uncomfortable memories, the Tombstone, the last physical reminder of the St. Francis Dam, lay broken and buried. Later that year, a two-lane road was bulldozed over the gravesite. As people traveled the new route between Powerhouses 1 and 2, many were unaware they were passing through the ghost of the St. Francis Dam.

  By then, control had slipped from Bill Mulholland’s usually tight grip. On May 10, 1928, two months after the St. Francis Dam failure, in response to pressure from the public and press, the Los Angeles Board of Water and Power Commissioners convened a panel of experts to evaluate the capacity and safety of the city’s entire water system, including the Owens River Aqueduct.1

  The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce also appointed a special commission to survey the safety of all municipal dams. In July, the City Council did the same. Again L.A. was awash in investigations. After an examination of twenty-nine dams, Council evaluators declared twenty-one safe. Improvements and other construction plans were approved for three others. The studies recommended that five dams be enlarged or existing construction plans modified to take “extraordinary precautions.”2

  Like many of the great U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projects, Mulholland chose to build the St. Francis and Mulholland Dams with concrete because such structures were considered especially strong and impervious to water. In every study of the St. Francis failure, the quality of the concrete, while not ideal, was absolved as a major contributing factor to the collapse. This may have been justified, but one outspoken Los Angeles engineer, J. H. Levering, publicly acknowledged that business pressures and politics could be factors in dam design. “The virtues and benefits of cement construction have been extolled and its faults minimized by the National Association of Cement Manufacturers, who have developed one of the most aggressive and efficient sales organizations in the country, and have built up a strong prejudice in favor of their product that is difficult to overcome. For that reason cement is often specified to the exclusion of other material more suitable for the intended use.”3

  During the Coroner’s Inquest, in a letter to Los Angeles County District Attorney Asa Keyes, an angry Denver consulting engineer was more direct: “Ninety-five per cent of the newspapers in America are subsidized by the Cement Trust … There is a tendency to lay all concrete failures onto the contractor. When in fact, it is due to the inherent weaknesses of cement itself.”4

  While unwilling to question the validity of a well-built concrete dam, some engineers, including the Chief’s persistent critic, Frederick Finkle, argued that given the geology of San Francisquito Canyon, a rock-fill structure might have been safer, and perhaps would still be standing.5 Despite a few isolated complaints and accusations, the trend for large concrete dams was well established and growing, but there was urgent unfinished business concerning William Mulholland’s second concrete barrier.

  Visible for miles across the flatlands of Los Angeles—a bright-white triangle in the Hollywood Hills—the Mulholland Dam was hard to ignore. Four months before it was completed in December 1924, an article in the Los Angeles Times proudly described the curved two-hundred-foot-tall concrete wall: “the dam has been made unusually strong as a means of safety … It is said that few dams in the world are as heavy in comparison to the amount of water impounded.”6 The St. Francis Dam was even heavier. Four years later, in 1928, when some activist residents of the movie capital learned they lived beneath a virtual duplicate of the dam that lay in ruins in San Francisquito Canyon, they weren’t willing to wait for late-night phone calls or the wail of motorcycle sirens.

  English-born David Horsley was a founder of Hollywood’s first film studio, established in 1911 in an old saloon on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. As soon as the truth about the Mulholland Dam emerged, Horsley, long retired from silent movies, refused to remain speechless. He didn’t want a real-life cliffhanger looming over his or anyone’s Hollywood home or business. Horsley estimated that if the Mulholland Dam failed as had its sister in San Francisquito Canyon, the flood would kill hundreds of thousands and cost hundreds of millions, far more than the death toll and tab the city faced for the collapse of the St. Francis Dam.

  The Mulholland Dam looms above downtown Hollywood. (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)

  At first, the DWP insisted the Mulholland Dam was perfectly safe, but, facing increasing concerns, the Department agreed to allow water in the reservoir to drain without being replenished. Glass by glass, gallon by gallon, Angelenos consumed the contents of the Hollywood Reservoir, at the rate of two feet a day, until it fell to a level the DWP claimed increased the factor of safety four times. Giant lights illuminated the dam at night, and armed guards provided security around the clock to deter any saboteurs who might think it was good idea to blow up the Mulholland Dam and wash sinful Hollywood off the map.

  The Chief was wounded by the Inquest verdict and the harsh evaluations from his engineering colleagues, but even as he faced the inevitability of retirement, he was unwilling to concede the value of a lifetime of service and experience. On May 1, 1928, he wrote a letter to the Board of Water and Power Commissioners expressing urgent concerns for L.A.’s water supply: “The Hollywood Reservoir is now down to an elevation of about 725 and considering the early period of the year, [I] beg to suggest that the Board is taking a grave responsibility in consenting to drawing it down as low as this and I want to advise emphatically that the further depletion of this basin be carefully considered and will be attended with the gravest danger.” The letter was signed with a hand shaking with age and anger.7 The Chief wasn’t accustomed to being ignored, but the Hollywood Reservoir was kept around 50 percent of its capacity until an independent investigation could prove the Mulholland Dam was safe.

  David Horsley didn’t want more studies. He wanted the Mulholland Dam to disappear. To promote his cause, he launched a newspaper, the Hollywood Dam News. When a minor earthquake hit the area at 6:40 A.M. on September 11, 1928, the temblor caused no damage, but it provided a big story on Horsley’s front page and shook the confidence of some Hollywood residents.8 Later, when a water main broke in a residential area, anxious rumors spread that the reservoir was leaking.

  On October 6, 1928, a headline in the Hollywood Dam News announced: ANOTHER DAM GOES FLOOEY. The 160-foot-high Lafayette Dam near Oakland had failed on September 17, with only fifteen feet of water behind it. Studies determined that the clay foundation was too soft to support the structure. Fortunately, there were no deaths or injuries. Horsley, no fan of the Boulder Canyon project, informed his readers that Arthur Powell Davis, “a former Director of the United States Reclamation Bureau, and the father of the Boulder Dam idea,” had been in charge of California’s latest collapsing dam. He added that William Mulholland was a consultant on the project.9

  More studies were commissioned to evaluate the safety of
the Mulholland Dam. A committee empaneled by the Los Angeles City Council Investigation Commission included engineer A.J. Wiley and geologist F.L. Ransome, veterans of the governor’s St. Francis Dam inquiry. After evaluating all the city’s municipal dams, the City Council commissioners described the Mulholland Dam as “the best of the lot,” concluding, “The dam is well designed. It is well built and the concrete is of ample strength to resist the stresses to which it is exposed.”10

  Later, another report from a panel including John L. (Jack) Savage, chief designer for the Bureau of Reclamation and widely considered the greatest of American dam engineers, decided otherwise. After a detailed evaluation, Savage and his fellow investigators determined that the base of the Mulholland Dam was not wide enough to resist uplift pressures if the reservoir was filled to capacity. The engineers suggested a number of remedies to assure the safety of the structure without tearing it down.11

  Responding to these recommendations, Los Angeles agreed to build new, lower spillways that permanently kept the Hollywood Reservoir at less than half capacity. In addition, the dam’s exterior received a reassuring makeover. A large berm containing 330,000 cubic feet of earth was piled against the downstream face and planted with trees, shrubs, and ground cover.12 Compared to keeping the reservoir well below full capacity, concealing most of the Mulholland Dam didn’t make the structure much stronger, but it certainly created a more comforting appearance to people living below.

  Even before safety measures and retrofitting were completed, fears stirred by David Horsley and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce threatened to harm the movie business and local real estate interests. Anti-dam critics backed off. After years of alarming accusations and engineering evaluations, the Mulholland Dam was confirmed as safe and allowed to survive. By 1934, it had become “the most peer reviewed dam in American history.”13

  As a result of the flurry of post–St. Francis Dam investigations and the Hollywood drama surrounding the fate of the Mulholland Dam, peer review and State supervision of large-dam construction in California became well established and effective. Between August 1929 and November 1931, 827 California dams were inspected. One third were found to be adequate, one third needed more examination, and one third required changes or repairs. A second round of inspections between 1931 and 1936 examined 950 California dams. One third needed repairs.

  A planted earthen berm, added to the downstream face of the Mulholland Dam (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)

  New dam-safety regulations prevented at least one potential tragedy. Supported by a 1924 bond issue, the Los Angeles County Flood Control District, a sometime water-management rival to William Mulholland and the DWP, commissioned the San Gabriel Dam in the mountains above Los Angeles. The proposed arched gravity structure was designed to be 512 feet high, more than twice the height of the St. Francis Dam. The Chief and his old associate J.B. Lippincott publicly opposed the project.

  During initial construction, a massive landslide led to an investigation. The conclusions, announced on November 16, 1929, warned that the San Gabriel project “could not be constructed without menace to life and property.” Revelations didn’t end there. The agreement with the original contractor was canceled, but it was learned that the company was paid anyway. Further inquiries revealed that a county supervisor had accepted bribes to facilitate the final disbursements. Adding corruption to incompetency wasn’t something the battered engineering profession and fledgling dam-safety movement wanted to face in the aftermath of the failure of the St. Francis Dam.

  On August 14, 1929, three months before the hazards of the San Gabriel Dam were exposed to the public, the California State Legislature passed the Civil Engineers Registration Bill. During the first year, there were 5,700 applicants. Five thousand were accepted—one registered engineer for every one thousand people in the State of California. After June 30, 1930, a written exam was required. No one could sign a contract for engineering services without being registered and accepted by State authorities.14

  Following California’s lead, heightened awareness of the importance of aggressive dam-safety regulations spread to other state legislatures, the federal government, and even overseas. During a meeting in Berlin on June 22, 1930, the International Large Dams Commission, founded in 1925, became a subcommittee on the World Power Conference, which had been organized to share ideas about present and future energy issues and best engineering practices. An article in the New York Times reported: “The St. Francis disaster served to give sharp point to the argument that the final form of the commission should be settled as soon as possible in order that it might start functioning effectively.”

  The change was considered a victory for representatives of the United States, who were eager to establish an international source for dam-engineering consultation and expertise without mandating specific construction codes that engineers feared would “stultify the art.” They believed that “varying conditions for each site affect the selection of the type of dam on the basis of experience and precedent far more than pure mathematics can.”15

  In the years that followed, the lessons of the St. Francis Dam were quietly learned and applied. In 1934, when a replacement for the St. Francis Dam was constructed in adjacent Bouquet Canyon, every step of the planning and building of the earth-filled barrier received scrutiny and evaluation by independent panels of engineers and geologists, as well as representatives from the State of California.

  After the tragedy in San Francisquito Canyon and the stay of execution for the Mulholland Dam, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power would never build another concrete dam. But old plans for an earthen dam and reservoir remained unrealized in the Owens Valley. In 1932, the city purchased acreage owned by former mayor and “Father of the Owens River Aqueduct” Fred Eaton. Nearly thirty years before, Mulholland’s fight with Eaton and the Watterson brothers over a proposed dam and reservoir in Long Valley alienated Eaton from his friend and acolyte and destroyed hopes of compromise with Owens Valley activists. Some said the failed deal influenced the Chief’s decision to build more water storage closer to the city, including the St. Francis Dam. Now, after a three-decade stalemate, as America slid into the Great Depression, Eaton, old, feeble, and deeply in debt, accepted an appraised price of $650,000 for his Long Valley property. He had once demanded more than two million.

  Later, when Mulholland learned his estranged friend and mentor was close to death, he rushed to Eaton’s Los Angeles bedside. “Hello, Fred,” the Chief said when he arrived. The battle-hardened water warriors talked quietly about old times and grand ambitions.16 Shortly afterward, Mulholland told his daughter Rose about a dream. He and Eaton were young again, but the Chief said he knew they both were dead.17

  Fred Eaton went first on March 11, 1934. In December of that year, Mulholland had a paralyzing stroke. At family gatherings his granddaughter and biographer remembered watching the once-vigorous engineer sitting in withdrawn silence, seemingly lost in a different place and another time. After years of racing the future, he’d been outrun. The end came on July 22, 1935. The official cause was arteriosclerosis and apoplexy, but the stroke had crippled the Chief’s ability to swallow. Ultimately he died from starvation … and thirst.18

  On July 24, flags in Los Angeles were set at half-mast as Mulholland’s body lay in state in the City Hall rotunda. All work ceased on the Colorado River Aqueduct for one minute and the flow of water from Haiwee Reservoir was temporarily turned off. In an effusive obituary and lengthy historical appreciation, the Los Angeles Times declared “Messages of regret pour in with unstinting praise for the greatness of Mulholland [from] near and far.”19 The response from the Owens Valley offered a different point of view. Later, a local newspaper editor wrote, “To him [Mulholland] the Inyo people were outlander enemies to be conquered … [until] the tragedy of the San Francisquito dam sent out its flood to take hundreds of lives and to wash down the clay feet of the city’s most deified idol.”20

  In the he
art of the St. Francis Dam floodpath, the response in the Santa Paula Chronicle was stunning: silence. There was a one-paragraph United Press wire-service announcement with no mention of the death and destruction caused by the Chief’s misjudgments. The same was true for the Ventura Star, which after the flood demanded “an eye for an eye” from Los Angeles. The New York Times carried a brief article highlighting the California engineer’s “colorful career,” extolling the “far-sightedness and persistence” that led to the completion of the Owens River Aqueduct. Again, no mention of the St. Francis Dam.21 Only the Piru News acknowledged Mulholland’s passing at any length, spending more space on his involvement in a local water project in 1886 than the impact of the St. Francis tragedy.22 Daily journalism has been called “the first draft of history.” If so, after only seven years, the St. Francis Dam disaster was being edited from the record.

  During his life, William Mulholland’s reputation veered between overblown adulation and bitter attacks, but by 1930, thanks in part to his efforts, Los Angeles was America’s fifth-largest city, with a population of 1,238,048, including 43,000 registered real estate agents eager to greet and settle new arrivals.

  The Chief didn’t live to see the realization of his last great ambition. On September 30, 1935, only two months after he died, the 726-foot-tall concrete arch Hoover Dam, spanning the Colorado River, was officially dedicated. A little more than a year later, on October 9, 1936, power surged along 266 miles of transmission lines and arrived in Los Angeles. Searchlights scanned the night as thousands of excited Angelenos lined Broadway, which had been rechristened “the Canyon of Lights.”