THE LITTLE KNOWN, BUT 2ND DEADLIEST DISASTER IN CALIFORNIA HISTORY

Two minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, on a star-less night...40 miles northwest of Downtown Los Angeles and 10 miles north of the present city of Santa Clarita. This was the stage for a tragic event that would take the lives of up to 600 people, ranking only behind the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire as the greatest disaster in the state’s history.

The St. Francis Dam collapsed, flooding the towns along it’s way to the ocean...killing everything in it’s path...with a 120 foot wall of water. The St. Francis Dam was opened just 2 years earlier and it was one of several concrete gravity dam, built to create a large regulating and storage reservoir for the City of Los Angeles. The reservoir was an integral part of the city’s Los Angeles Aqueduct water supply infrastructure. It was located in San Francisquito Canyon.

I made a trip up the canyon road many years ago, at night. I had read of the dam collapse and wanted to stand for myself at a site where so much human life had been lost unexpectedly. It was dark, no moonlight, as were the conditions on the fateful night in 1928. I continued to ascend up the canyon, closer and closer to where the actual dam had failed, where giant concrete scars still spoke to the freshness of the event. It was creepy.....like visiting an ancient tomb, or sailing towards the exact spot in the Atlantic Ocean where the Titanic collided with a notorious iceberg.

There were many dams, like the St. Francis dam, that were engineered and built by the patriarch of modern Los Angeles, Mr. William Mulholland, without whose contribution------- Los Angeles would be only a scant version of what it is today. He brought the water via the Los Angeles Aqueduct from Owens Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Mulholland needed aqueducts to store this transported water and the St. Francis dam was such a dam.

“Although there were no surviving eyewitnesses to the collapse, the time of 11:57:30 p.m. is the accepted time of the failure. At this time, personnel of the Bureau of Power and Light at both Receiving Stations in Los Angeles and of the Water Works and Supply at Powerhouse No. 1 noted a sharp drop in the voltage on their lines. At the same time a transformer at Southern California Edison‘s Saugus substation exploded. That transformer was connected to the Antelope Valley power line, which ran up the western hillside of San Francisquito canyon near the dam to poles that were located about ninety feet above the east abutment. The prevailing theory of the investigators was that this line was severed as the eastern hillside and abutment gave way. The grounded lines caused a short, which in turn caused the transformer to explode.

It is known that no less than five people passed the dam within an hour before the failure and none of them noticed any conditions that were out of the ordinary. A motorcyclist named Ace Hopewell, a carpenter at Powerhouse No. 1 had ridden past the dam by his estimate, approximately ten minutes before midnight. In his testimony at the Coroner’s Inquest, he stated that he had ridden up the canyon and had passed both Powerhouse No. 2 and the dam without seeing anything that caused him concern. He went on to state that at approximately one and one-half miles (2.4 km) upstream of the dam he heard, above the sound of his motorcycle, a rumbling sound which he described sounded much like “rocks rolling on the hill.” He stopped and got off his motorcycle, leaving the engine idling, and smoked a cigarette while checking the hillside above him. He could still hear the sound that had caught his attention earlier though now fainter and behind him. Assuming it had possibly been a landslide as these were common to the area and satisfied that he was in no danger, continued on his way. It is believed that he was the last person to have seen the St. Francis Dam intact.

The flood heavily damaged the towns of Fillmore and Bardsdale, and devastated much of the city of Santa Paula before emptying its victims and debris into the Pacific Ocean near Ventura at Montalvo at 5:30 a.m.. The flood had taken only 5 hours and 27 minutes to travel the 54 miles (87 km) from the dam site to the sea. At that time it was almost two miles (3 km) wide and traveling at a speed of 6 mph (9.7 km/h). Bodies of victims were recovered from the Pacific Ocean, some as far south as the Mexican border, while others were never found.”

The Cause:

There is no absolute certainty what brought on the devastating dam collapse.

The committee ended their report with, “...having examined all the evidence which it has been able to obtain to date reports its conclusions as follows:

1. The type and dimensions of the dam were amply sufficient if based on suitable foundation.
2. The concrete of which the dam was built was of ample strength to resist the stresses to which it would normally be subjected.
3. The failure cannot be laid to movement of the earth’s crust.
4. The dam failed as a result of defective foundations.
5. This failure reflects in no way the stability of a well designed gravity dam properly founded on suitable bedrock.”

Los Angeles DWP head, William Mulholland, was cleared of any official wrongdoing but the collapse of the dam was said to have sent him to an “early grave”. He never overcame the guilt of the dam collapse and he resigned from his position immediately, fading out of public spotlight, a brilliant and indispensable career, tarnished. Mulholland died 12 years later in 1940.