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    St. Francis Dam Disaster
    St. Francis Dam Disaster
    St. Francis Dam Disaster
    Ebook156 pages1 hour

    St. Francis Dam Disaster

    By John Nichols

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    About this ebook

    Minutes before midnight on the evening of March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed. The dam's 200-foot concrete wall crumpled, sending billions of gallons of raging flood waters down San Francisquito Canyon, sweeping 54 miles down the Santa Clara River to the sea, and claiming over 450 lives in the disaster. Captured here in over 200 images is a photographic record of the devastation caused by the flood, and the heroic efforts of residents and rescue workers.Built by the City of Los Angeles' Bureau of Water Works and Supply, the failure of the St. Francis Dam on its first filling was the greatest American civil engineering failure of the 20th century. Beginning at dawn on the morning after the disaster, stunned local residents picked up their cameras to record the path of destruction, and professional photographers moved in to take images of the washed-out bridges, destroyed homes and buildings, Red Cross workers giving aid, and the massive clean-up that followed. The event was one of the worst disasters in California's history, second only to the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439630334
    St. Francis Dam Disaster
    Author

    John Nichols

    John Nichols (1940–2023) was the acclaimed author of the New Mexico trilogy. Beginning with the publication of The Milagro Beanfield War, which was adapted into a film by Robert Redford, the series of novels grew from regional stature to national appeal, from literary radicals to cult classics. Beloved for his compassionate, richly comic vision and admired for his insight into the cancer that accompanies unbridled progress, Nichols was also the author of a dozen novels and several works of nonfiction. He lived in northern New Mexico.

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      Book preview

      St. Francis Dam Disaster - John Nichols

      indicated.

      INTRODUCTION

      Minutes before midnight on the chilly evening of March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam failed. The dam’s 185-foot high concrete wall crumpled and collapsed, sending billions of gallons of raging flood waters down San Francisquito Canyon, about five miles northeast of Magic Mountain in what is now Santa Clarita. As the flood picked up debris it became a giant thick snake of mud and water and houses and bodies crawling at an average of 12 miles per hour down the Santa Clara River Valley and eating everything in its 54-mile path to the Pacific Ocean. It was a moving accident.

      Built by the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply, the St. Francis Dam Disaster was the greatest American civil engineering failure of the 20th century when it collapsed on its first filling. As a result of the dam’s failure 1,200 homes were damaged, 909 were totally destroyed, 10 bridges were washed out, power was knocked out over a wide area, and the communities of Castaic, Piru, Fillmore, Bardsdale, Santa Paula, and Saticoy were paralyzed. An exact death toll is impossible to estimate because the bodies of many victims were washed out to sea with the floodwaters, but more than 450 people perished that night. It is California’s second largest disaster; only the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 claimed more lives.

      A frog slowly heated in a container of water will swim about until it dies. Dropped into a container of hot water, the frog will immediately jump out. Like this proverbial frog, we are unable to sense a disaster unless it comes upon us suddenly like a fire or a flood. A slowly-evolving event is usually too imperceptible for humans to recognize, like the gradual erosion of our liberties and our culture. A disaster attracts our attention because it represents a moment when we have to wake ourselves up and pay attention to our world. Suddenly there’s no sleeping in this classroom. The very thought of a significant disaster sensitizes all our nerve endings and nudges us to wake to the relatively disaster-free reality swirling around us daily.

      One very human response to any significant event in our modern lives is the acquisition of images memorializing the strong reaction we had to the event. In this modern world we tend to stalk our emotional stimuli and hunt them down with a camera. The results are an accumulation of historical visual debris. Piles of visual debris can be torn apart and organized into something that might have meaning for humans far removed from San Francisquito Canyon or flooding or even the ever-present closeness of personal mortality.

      I have pored over pages of old newspapers and the crumbling black pages of old photo albums. I have read and collected all the books printed on the subject. I have examined with a powerful lens the photographs that have been given to me for research, looking for elusive details that only a snapshot could reveal. I have scanned images at high resolution and zoomed in on details hidden to the naked eye. I have recorded family histories and the sagas of the survivors still living. I have immersed myself in the St. Francis Dam Disaster, and all this visual and verbal information bobs around in my mind like the homes and trees caught up in the debris flow that ravaged my hometown of Santa Paula.

      The study of disasters is not depressing, not morbid. The stories and images that come out of any disaster connect us with our fellow humans and with our own humanity. They connect us not only with life and death but with each of the basic human characteristics we all encounter in life.

      The focus on this current book of photographs is on the aftermath of the flood downstream and the impact on the lives of everyday people who lived and worked in the rural valley below the dam. Histories of the disaster have been written that cover the building, engineering, geology and politics of the St. Francis Dam. My intention here is to show as many photographs of the downstream aftermath as possible and weave in the stories of the heroes and survivors.

      I have been guided by the essential research of Santa Paula historian Charles Outland who wrote Man-Made Disaster (unfortunately out of print and rare) and by the technical expertise of J. David Rogers who contributed to the Ventura County Museum of History and Art’s The St. Francis Dam Disaster Revisited.

      There will never be a complete telling of the story of the St. Francis Dam Disaster. We gather the facts as we find them and those facts are distributed downstream in random patterns just like the pieces of the collapsed dam.

      One

      DAM BREAK

      THE MORNING OF THE DAM BREAK. Pictured are William Mulholland, Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply; Harvey Van Norman, Assistant Chief Engineer; and dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger walking across the crest of the recently filled

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