Floodpath Read online

  For Nancy

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Black Americans: From Colonial Days to the Present

  Los Angeles: A Pictorial Celebration

  (with Nancy Wilkman)

  Picturing Los Angeles

  (with Nancy Wilkman)

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1. Monday

  2. The Chief and the City of the Angels

  3. “There It Is, Take It!”

  4. Holding Back the Future

  5. A Monster in the Dark

  6. No Time for Nightmares

  7. The Dead Zone

  8. Sympathy, Anger, and Amends

  9. Arguing Over the Ruins

  10. Los Angeles on Trial

  11. Rewinding Time

  12. Hasty Conclusions and High Dams

  13. Paying the Price and Moving On

  14. Unfinished Business and Historical Amnesia

  15. Charley’s Obsession and Computer Time Machines

  16. After the Fall

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  Tik, tik, tik, tik … a rotating sprinkler arched spray across a lawn in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Chatsworth. It was a balmy Southern California morning in 2002 and I was in the northwestern reaches of Los Angeles, on my way to an important interview. The Valley, as it is commonly known, is more than a barely differentiated landscape of suburban communities. If separated from Los Angeles, it would be the sixth-most-populous city in the United States.

  The area had a typical share of anonymous apartment complexes and strip malls, but the quiet tree-bordered street I was driving along was lined with low, ranch-style homes and seemed vaguely rural. A little more than forty years before, it was. A few orphaned orange trees bore fruit no one seemed interested or available to pick, and there were glimpses of short stretches of whitewashed fence surrounding remains of one or two horse ranches with dilapidated stables.

  In the near distance, dry, rock-ribbed hills looked like a landscape in the Arizona desert. In fact, the rugged terrain had been a popular location for Hollywood Westerns since at least 1910. Between lawns in this 1970s housing development, defined by cinder-block walls and cul de sacs, a few sandy patches of open land were reminders that imported water made the streetscape green. Another indication of the influence of hydraulic engineering, a concrete-lined flood channel snaked behind backyards, momentarily disappeared underground, then resurfaced a block or two away. In 1919, Chatsworth was home to a large reservoir, but in 1971 a severe earthquake exposed weaknesses in the storage system’s two earthen dams. A year later, the reservoir was drained and only used for non-drinkable runoff.

  When I arrived at my destination—a pleasant-looking home with an attractive front lawn and garden—a two-man camera crew was waiting. We had come to videotape an interview with writer Catherine Mulholland about her legendary grandfather, William Mulholland, the civil engineer who brought the water that made this San Fernando Valley neighborhood, and modern Los Angeles, possible.

  Inside, while my crew set up a camera, tripod, lights, and sound equipment, Catherine and I chatted quietly. We had met before at historical functions, but I didn’t know her well. She was aware that my wife and partner, Nancy, and I had spent years researching her grandfather’s career and his role in the failure of the St. Francis Dam, a tragedy considered the deadliest man-made disaster of twentieth-century America.1

  Tall, gray-haired, in her early eighties, with hints of her grandfather’s determined Irish features, Catherine was friendly but reserved. She’d recently been interviewed for a public television documentary and, despite assurances of fair treatment, had been disappointed and angry when her words were edited into a polemic against her grandfather and what was commonly portrayed as the evil and corrupt history of water in Los Angeles. Whatever the truth, growing up in the 1920s and ’30s not far from where she lived now, bearing the Mulholland name, Catherine experienced a mixed legacy of pride and animosity. As soon as she could, she escaped to the University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in history. Matronly sixty years later, in her younger days Catherine had been somewhat of a family rebel, among other things a longtime friend of iconoclastic jazz bassist and composer Charlie Mingus. Later she returned to Southern California and began to quietly confront the past, writing two books about her girlhood in the Valley, and then a biography of her grandfather.

  With an impressive painting of William Mulholland in the background, the interview proceeded smoothly through her grandfather’s life and career, but her answers became hesitant as we approached the subject of the St. Francis Dam. Catherine admitted that the chapter in her book about the disaster had been the hardest to write, as she struggled to find a fair evaluation of a life she compared to a Greek tragedy. “He never understood what happened, and that unanswered puzzle haunted him for the rest of his life,” she said, and her voice trailed off.2 Others are less forgiving. They believe Mulholland was less the victim of a tragedy and more the creator of one.

  After my last question, Catherine sat quietly for a few moments, then slowly stood and asked me to follow her to a library and writing room. Sitting on a well-organized worktable were three cardboard filing boxes. Neatly printed on each was SFD. I knew immediately what the letters stood for: St. Francis Dam. “You can take these,” she said. When I looked inside, I found the boxes stuffed with photocopied newspaper articles from across the United States and even from overseas. All were stories about the St. Francis Dam disaster.

  “I only ask you dig as deeply as you can and be fair and honest about what you find,” she said quietly. I answered that I couldn’t make promises about conclusions, but would do my best to find the truth and tell it.

  As I headed home with the three boxes placed carefully on the backseat of the car, I passed another lawn sprinkler arching spray, marking time, tik, tik, tik, tik, like a clock. My thoughts drifted back—to March 12, 1928. Just before midnight, in a remote canyon 50 miles north of Los Angeles, all was quiet. Without warning, the silence was blasted by an explosive roar as the St. Francis Dam, a 208-foot-tall concrete barrier, had suddenly cracked apart and collapsed. Within minutes, a 54-mile-long floodpath surged toward the Pacific Ocean. During five and a half hours of terror and destruction, nearly 500 people lost their lives, and property worth millions of dollars was damaged or destroyed. Despite the scale and horror of what happened that 1928 morning, few people have heard of the St. Francis Dam disaster, and, as I discovered, those who have often get the story wrong.

  I grew up a few miles from isolated San Francisquito Canyon, where the St. Francis Dam once stood, but in school, except for a brief fourth-grade immersion in the saga of Spanish missions in California, the 1849 Gold Rush, and the “triumph” of statehood in 1850, none of my teachers included the ruins in their lesson plans.

  After college in the Midwest, I traveled to New York to begin my career as a documentary filmmaker. There I learned my hometown was considered a superficial place, known for sybaritic fun in the sun, a city where the present and future were everything and the past next to nonexistent. Los Angeles was synonymous with Hollywood. Whatever many people knew about L.A.’s history involved the movies, especially the 1974 film-noir classic Chinatown.

  The plot of Chinatown is driven by a lust for water, intertwined with sinister schemes, intrigue, greed, corruption, murder, and even incest. Buried deep in the backstory of Robert Towne’s screenplay is a mysterious tragedy, the collapse of the Vanderlip Dam. Few details are given, but in the film city engineer Hollis Mulwray can’t ignore what happened, and is murdered for his refusal to forget.

  As a supposed portrait of L.A.’s past, Chinatown isn’t a pre
tty picture. After a preview screening, an official from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was reported to have sputtered, “It’s totally inaccurate! There was never any incest involved!”3

  When I returned to Los Angeles after fourteen years in New York, I rediscovered my hometown, and to my surprise learned that L.A.’s history is even more intriguing than the freely fictionalized plot of Chinatown. Of all the many overlooked chapters in the city’s past, I found the tragedy of the St. Francis Dam had importance far beyond the borders of the City of the Angels, with special relevance to a modern era of climate change and drought, where maintaining a safe infrastructure and managing water resources are more critical than ever.

  Set in the transformative 1920s, the St. Francis Dam disaster is a tale driven by great accomplishments, violence, and a century of controversy. In the end, it is a technological detective story. The narrative traces the rise and fall of William Mulholland, the man who perhaps more than anyone made Los Angeles America’s second-largest city. Mulholland accomplished this with an aqueduct, reservoirs, and dams.

  Unlike the visual drama of a great bridge, most dams are stolid. There are more than eighty-four thousand of them in the United States.4 They create man-made lakes for recreation; play a role in flood control, waterway navigation, irrigation for agriculture; provide storage for drinking water; and facilitate hydroelectric power. Dams have been essential to the development of California and the American West, but many more are found on the rivers and waterways of the Midwest, New England, and the Mid-Atlantic and South Atlantic Gulf Coast.5

  Water captured, distributed, and harnessed with the help of dams transformed America’s western deserts into flourishing ranchland, farms, and cities, but Los Angeles isn’t alone in its dependence on external sources to quench urban thirst and irrigate crops. Just much more so. As early as the 1840s, New Yorkers had polluted enough of the Hudson River to necessitate the construction of the first Croton dam, reservoir, and aqueduct to supply fresh drinking water from sources more than twenty miles to the north. This imported supply system, and later updates in the 1880s, were essential contributions to the city’s early growth and continue to support it today.

  Like many Americans, I’ve visited the Hoover Dam and have been appropriately awed, but at the time I didn’t know about the influence of the St. Francis floodpath on the politics, planning, and construction of one of the world’s greatest water and hydroelectric projects. But that didn’t matter. To celebrate the power of human technology, stand in the shadow of a great dam. To feel suddenly helpless, do the same. Big dams energized America in the first half of the twentieth century. They can be impressive, inspiring … and, as proven by the failure of the St. Francis Dam, deadly. That threat hasn’t disappeared.

  Although the majority of dams are small, any of them can be hazardous. A 2013 study by the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the quality of dam infrastructure in the United States a grade of D+. More than 4,400 dams were judged susceptible to failure. Only 66 percent of 14,000 high-hazard dams had an emergency action plan.6

  The more I learned about dams, dam safety, and the role of water in America, especially in the history of Los Angeles, the more the tragedy of the St. Francis Dam demanded to be rescued from obscurity. The process proved to be a long one. Regularly interrupted by other projects, I worked to trace the events that define a forgotten floodpath. I interviewed survivors and eyewitnesses, scoured little-known archives, scanned the pages of old newspapers, and talked with dam engineers, academic historians, and a handful of enthusiastic amateurs known as “dammies.” With my wife, Nancy’s help, I filled file cabinets to overflowing with transcripts, official reports, photographs, and even rare motion-picture film.

  William Mulholland dominated the narrative. He is remembered most commonly as the source of the name for a winding road above L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, but during the first years of the twentieth century, Mulholland’s determined—some said ruthless—leadership and hands-on engineering skills allowed Los Angeles to rise from isolated insignificance to international prominence.

  Mulholland’s career was a race against the future, with water as the grand prize. Water has been vital to all great cities. It usually comes as a legacy from nature—access to a natural harbor, flow from a great river, or ample rainfall. When American Los Angeles was born, the city had none of these. Man-made alternatives were needed to overcome natural disadvantages. City leaders broke the monopolistic grip of the Southern Pacific Railroad and convinced the federal government to dredge mud flats to create a deep-water port, now the busiest in the United States, and they attracted East Coast investors to finance a great aqueduct to quench the booming city’s thirst. But ambitious Angelenos couldn’t create cloudbursts. Average annual precipitation in New York is 44.75 inches. In Chicago it’s 36.89. In San Francisco, L.A.’s northern rival, the annual rainfall totals 20.78 inches. In Los Angeles it’s 14.98 inches. In 2015, during one of the worst droughts in recorded history, there was less rain than ever.7

  To a stranger, and even to longtime residents, Los Angeles can be geographically overwhelming. A common tourist itinerary includes L.A.’s historic Mexican plaza, which occupies little more than a city block. Around 1860, aside from a few flat-roofed adobes, a small “business district” with a two-story city hall, and nearby vineyards and farms, that was pretty much all there was to see. Today, Los Angeles spreads across 503 square miles, a vast megacity that is the gateway for nearly 40 percent of U.S. international trade, one of the most diverse multicultural urban environments on the planet, and the heart of the world’s third-largest metropolitan economy.8

  So how did this happen? Despite a legacy of stereotypes and clichés, “the city without a history” has a past, which has often been, for better and worse, a foreshadowing of the future of the United States. As one perceptive L.A. observer wrote: “Every city has had its boom, but the history of Los Angeles … should be regarded as one continuous boom punctuated at intervals with major explosions.”9 From the beginning, water coursed through this rushed history, including a hidden stream of events that stops short at the St. Francis Dam.

  On September 4, 1781, the first Spanish settlers, a straggling band of forty-four pobladores (townfolk), celebrated the founding of El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles (the Town of the Queen of the Angels). The new settlement was situated beside a shallow stream that Spanish explorers in 1769 christened Río Porciúncula, named after a Franciscan feast day.10

  Local Indians, who had lived in the area for hundreds if not thousands of years, watched or were coerced to assist as the pobladores followed official commands and built a small dam along the river and dug a primitive aqueduct, known as the Zanja Madre (Mother Ditch).11 Next, they staked off land for homes and farm plots. It can be said Los Angeles was born with a dam, a crude aqueduct, and an eighteenth-century subdivision.

  Sixty-nine years later, in 1850, after a hasty war wrested from Mexico most of what would be the American Southwest, California became an American state and the pueblo of Los Angeles a distant outpost. In 1860, the pace quickened when hums and clicking code from the East Coast arrived through telegraph lines connected to San Francisco, which had been transformed by the California Gold Rush virtually overnight into an energetic little frontier town.

  In 1860, Los Angeles was a violent Wild West backwater. The earliest surviving photograph of the city was taken around this time. The forlorn central plaza was dominated by a square structure made of brick and wood—L.A.’s first reservoir, constructed in the late 1850s. For a while, a short distance away, a forty-foot-high waterwheel near the river passed the flow through the Zanja Madre. A visitor at the time speculated about the future: “Los Angeles is a city of some 3,500 or 4,000 inhabitants; nearly a century old … All that is wanted naturally to make it a paradise is water, more water.”12

  The first known photograph of Los Angeles, c. 1860 (Author’s collection)

  In the late nineteenth century, Wil
liam Mulholland described the Los Angeles River as “upside down.” During the summer, the shallow stream disappeared into a sandy bed. In the winter, it raged with floods. Providing a steady supply wasn’t easy. In the 1860s, an L.A. mayor and entrepreneur installed crude wooden pipes, directly connecting the river and city reservoirs to individual homes. The fifteen thousand feet of hollowed tree trunks were hardly sanitary and often leaked. Even iron pipes didn’t fare better. Frustrated, depressed, and deeply in debt, the failed water man took a gun to the offices of the City Council and blew his brains out.13

  When the first transcontinental train arrived via San Francisco on September 5, 1876, L.A.’s isolation became a thing of the past, and a flood of newcomers was sustained by the uncertain resources of the Los Angeles River. Popular publications such as Charles Nordhoff’s California: For Health, Pleasure and Residence, a Book for Travellers and Settlers described an unspoiled paradise with stunning natural beauty, abundant agricultural potential, a reinvigorating climate, plenty of fresh air … and water.

  In the 1870s, a “Sick Rush” of health seekers spurred the growth of Los Angeles even more than the promise of gold made San Francisco the West Coast’s first important metropolis.14 Earthen dams and reservoirs appeared in the hills. All that was needed was enough rainfall and water from the river to fill them.

  By 1886, railroads delivered 120,000 visitors a year. Many decided to stay. In 1880, the assessed land value of Los Angeles was less than $5 million. By the end of the decade, it was more than $45 million. The city had electric streetlights, gas lines, a telephone exchange, and the beginnings of a transit system.

  In 1887, the real estate boom went bust. California author Mary Austin reflected on the sight of unfinished town projects and empty housing tracts, abandoned in the sun: “The unwatered palms had a hurt but courageous look, as of young wives when they first suspect that their marriages may be turning out badly.”15 In 1890, a satirical observer described those who chased the boom to the top, then tumbled down, as “Millionaires of a Day.” He noted that many were fixated on earnings from owning property, while ignoring the value of water in semiarid Southern California. They failed to realize, he wrote, “that dependence on the capricious clouds is the makeshift, and irrigation is the solid work.”16