The call that might have averted disaster came into William Mulholland’s office that morning. Stubborn, single-minded and tireless, lionized and controversial, the Los Angeles water boss was 72. Fifteen years earlier, he had opened the great aqueduct that carried Sierra snowmelt to the San Fernando Valley and made the metropolis possible.
Now, on March 12, 1928, a supervisor at the St. Francis Dam was calling to say there might be a problem. Water was seeping from under the structure. It looked muddy, which might indicate real trouble — erosion in the foundation.
Mulholland grabbed his assistant and told his chauffeur to head there. The curved concrete gravity dam towered 1,835 feet above sea level in the San Francisquito Canyon, about 30 miles northwest of L.A. The reservoir recently had filled to its 12.4-billion gallon capacity for the first time.
Dam builder William Mulholland, pointing, visits the site of the St. Francis Dam around 1926 with water officials, from left, Fred Fischer, R.F. Del Valle, Janus Baker and Dr. John Haynes.
It was Mulholland’s 19th and final dam. He had willed it into existence in his characteristic way, fast and without faultfinding inspectors to impede his vision. He gave the construction job to city workers, rather than invite bids (and complications) from contractors beyond his control.
With little formal education, Mulholland had left his native Ireland in his teens, worked steamer ships on the Great Lakes, labored in lumber camps and prospected for gold. He stowed away on a ship to reach the Pacific Coast but was thrown off and forced to cross the Isthmus of Panama by foot.
In 1877, he got to Los Angeles, then a 10,000-person backwater, and began working for the water company as a zanjero, or ditch-digger. He studied hydraulics, civil engineering and Shakespeare at the public library and impressed everyone with his pluck and problem-solving prowess.
Now he was “The Chief,” the unquestioned czar of the city’s water department, with vast sway. As The Times put it, he regarded the voices of critics as “the barking of a dog in the night.”
The St. Francis Dam reached its capacity before its collapse right before midnight on Mar. 12, 1928.
“He could do what he wanted … After the aqueduct was built, he resisted anyone supervising him,” said Donald C. Jackson, co-author (with Norris Hundley Jr.) of “Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster.”
Mulholland wanted to guarantee L.A.’s water supply against the threat of drought and saboteurs. The St. Francis Dam, part of the larger aqueduct system, was meant to store surplus water. No fanfare had attended its completion near what is now Santa Clarita in 1926, the better to avoid attention from Owens Valley vigilantes, who were known to dynamite aqueduct pipes as protest against the diversion of their river water. (The guile and skulduggery behind the aqueduct’s birth is a famous story, and famously mythologized.)
In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.
On the east side, the dam was build atop an ancient landslide of mica schist, a type of rock vulnerable to fracturing that would allow moisture to seep inside. On schist foundations, cautious engineers knew to build in safety features like a series of cut-off trenches and drainage pipes — a step Mulholland had neglected.
There was nothing to fear, Mulholland declared as he inspected the water leaking from the dam that morning. The muddiness? That was from the water spilling over a dirt road, not from internal erosion. The czar returned to L.A.
“Like all dams, there are little seeps here and there,” Mulholland would later testify at a coroner’s inquest. “Of all the dams I have built and of all the dams I have ever seen, it was the driest dam of its size I ever saw in my life.”
“Did it occur to you that it was in danger?” he was asked.
William Mulholland came to California with little formal education and became a respected civil engineer.
(Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries/California Historical Society)
“No sir,” Mulholland answered. “It never occurred to me that it was in danger.”
And if he had known?
“I would have sent a Paul Revere alarm up and down the Valley,” he said.
At 11:57 that night, the eastern portion of the dam gave way. Water had saturated the mica schist and reactivated the old landslide.
Soon, the entire 208-foot-tall structure collapsed, unleashing a 10-story wall of water and obliterating cabins in its path. Among the first to die was the man who had alerted Mulholland to the seepage — Tony Harnischfeger, who lived just below the dam with his 6-year-old son. Their bodies were never found.
The water crashed into a hydroelectric plant about a mile and a half downstream, killing most of the crew and their families — more than 60 people. The flood was strong enough to sweep a 10,000-ton fragment of the dam, called Block 29, a full quarter-mile and to destroy a steel bridge on the Santa Clara River nine miles away.
March 14, 1928: Remains of homes in Santa Paula following the collapse of St. Francis Dam.
It took about 45 minutes for the reservoir to empty, but the death continued for hours. On its 53-mile path to the Pacific Ocean, water ripped through orchards, uprooted orange groves and flipped cars. It tore nightclothes from people who had been sleeping moments before. Some bodies were carried for miles. Many were trapped beneath tangled tree limbs.
Near L.A. County’s border with Ventura, in a makeshift tent city for Southern California Edison employees who were building a transmission line, the water hit around 1:20 a.m. and killed 84 more.
Warnings were slow to arrive. Many people didn’t have phones. In some towns, they just didn’t believe the urgent instructions to clear out — they had no idea they were in a flood path.
Searchers picked through mud and debris, and bodies were carried to makeshift morgues.
“With the dead stacked in piles, the French & Skillin Chapel in Fillmore today took on a grim aspect as the silent workers hurried back and forth bringing in their gruesome burdens,” the Santa Paula Chronicle reported.
Seven coffins containing victims of the 1928 St. Francis Dam collapse are prepared for burial in the Santa Clara River Valley.
People hurried to identify victims before they decomposed, in an era before refrigeration. Animal carcasses filled the Santa Clara River. To prevent disease, stray dogs that fed on them were shot.
More than 400 people died. Many of the missing never were found, and a precise death toll never was agreed on. The Ventura County district attorney said his county “has borne the brunt of the greatest disaster of its kind in the history of the State” — and he was clear on who deserved the blame. The dam, he said, “was the creature of the city of Los Angeles.”
It was easy to identify the individual most responsible for bringing the creature into existence. Death threats poured into Mulholland’s office. The Los Angeles Record demanded: “Resign Now!”
He offered to quit, but the city wouldn’t let him. He slumped with his face in his arms and “sobbed like a brokenhearted child,” according to a witness account in Gary Krist’s “The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination and the Invention of Los Angeles,” which identifies Mulholland as one of three seminal figures in the city’s creation.
At an emergency telephone station, people seek information after the dam’s collapse.
“This inquiry is a very painful thing for me,” Mulholland testified at an L.A. County coroner’s inquest two weeks after the disaster. “The only ones I envy about this thing are the ones who are dead.”
At first, Mulholland seemed to dodge blame. He suggested that perhaps dynamite might be the culprit. He said the site was “vulnerable to human aggression.” He even suggested it might be cursed — “There is a hoodoo on it.”
The California governor, C.C. Young, launched a commission to look into the dam failure. The report, completed within weeks, laid the blame on “defective foundations,” concluding that gravity dams were safe if built on bedrock.
It was hard not to see politics at play. The concrete mega-structure that would become the Hoover Dam needed congressional approval, and Mulholland was a strong advocate. It was not prudent to destroy him.
With the state report complete, and vigilante sabotage ruled out, Mulholland retook the inquest stand. He was given the chance to blame underlings. Wasn’t it true, a juror asked, that he had taken to delegating tasks to subordinates in recent years?
Mulholland replied that he had taken just one vacation in 50 years and that, at 72, he was working as hard as ever: “There are a very few beat me in the office in the morning.”
The man responsible for one of the greatest engineering marvels of his time, the 233-mile aqueduct that gave a semiarid region a world-class city, now admitted responsibility for one of the greatest engineering disasters in American history.
“Don’t blame anyone else, you just fasten it on me,” he said. “If there is any error in human judgment, I was the human. I won’t try to fasten it on anybody else.”
March 13, 1928: Flood-twisted railroad track in Castaic on the Santa Paula-Montalvo branch of Southern Pacific following the dam’s collapse.
It was never clear how closely he had supervised the dam’s design, which he’d given to draftsmen to execute. But he had ordered the structure built on an unstable foundation, without consulting independent geologists or engineers. He had raised the dam’s height mid-construction, without widening the base to support the extra water pressure.
Dam safety laws allowed municipalities with their own engineering departments to operate without state oversight, and Mulholland had taken advantage of this loophole.
He certainly had been guilty of hubris, concluded Jackson, the historian. But had he committed a crime? The inquest, which lasted three weeks, was supposed to decide. The assistant district attorney assigned to the case spoke to jurors in terms that seemed to guarantee Mulholland’s exoneration.
“It would be monstrous to place a man upon trial for the crime of manslaughter or murder, who just merely made an error of judgment,” the prosecutor said.
March 1928: The remaining section of the St. Francis Dam with crumbled sections at its base.
The jury blamed “the very poor quality of the underlying rock structure” and decided Mulholland had broken no law.
The Times, a longtime Mulholland booster, blamed “a faulty system which loads upon any man’s shoulders, no matter how broad, responsibilities that are too heavy for any man to bear.” When he resigned seven months later, the newspaper added: “The tragedy, which was keenly felt by the ‘Chief’ as he is called at the water department, has aged him.”
He died in 1935, at age 79, at his home on St. Andrews Place. His Times obituary was headlined “Death Calls Aqueduct Builder.” It did not mention the collapse of the St. Francis Dam.
Nor did the city want to remember. A memorial plaque to Mulholland praised his “prophetic vision” as the builder of the great aqueduct, describing him as “a penniless Irish immigrant boy, who rose by the force of his industry, intelligence, integrity and intrepidity, to be a sturdy American citizen, an engineering genius, a whole-hearted humanitarian …”
“Los Angeles never wanted to talk about it again,” Jackson said. “He was given a lot of deference, so long as he quietly moved along.”
The city paid an average of about $5,000 per victim for 172 death settlements. Ray Rising, who had lived with his family at the compound for hydroelectric plant workers, lost his wife and three children when the flood hit their wooden bungalow.
After Rising sued, the city’s attorney argued that the dam collapse was “an act of God,” even though Mulholland admitted responsibility. A jury gave Rising $30,000.
In the aftermath of the disaster, dam construction laws were tightened. The great slope of Mulholland’s concrete gravity dam in the Hollywood Hills — a model for the one that failed — was covered with dirt to disguise its terrifying height.
For about a year, towering remnants of the St. Francis Dam stood eerily in the empty canyon, a reminder of the disaster, before the city had them dynamited.
Sources for this report include “Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster” by Norris Hundley Jr. and Donald C. Jackson; “The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles” by Gary Krist; and Times archives.
