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The St. Francis Dam Disaster: California's Forgotten Deadliest Night | Sleep History · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to Sleepless History, the show where we wander slowly through the forgotten corners of the past.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of stories that rarely make it into a school textbook, but that shaped the world we live in.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to California, to a single canyon north of Los Angeles, and to one man who, for a few decades, was treated almost like a god.
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[SPEAKER_00]: about a wall of concrete that should never have been allowed to fail.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and about the thousands of ordinary lives that were sleeping in its path on a spring night in 1928, settling, get comfortable.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of the St. Francis Dam and the ruin of William Mulholland.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Before we begin tonight's story, a quick note, sleepless history
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[SPEAKER_00]: If these stories have become part of your nightly routine, you can support the show on Patreon, linked in the show notes, early access, and free listening, and your favorite episodes with no background noise are waiting for you now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if that's not for you right now, that's okay.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Simply commenting or following the show helps just as much.
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[SPEAKER_00]: With that said, let's begin.
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[SPEAKER_00]: part 1, the King of Water.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It is 2 and a half minutes before midnight on March 12th.
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[SPEAKER_00]: 1928.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Picture the canyon as it would have looked to anyone standing there in those final moments, though almost no one was.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The walls rise steeply on either side.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Pale rock catching what little light the moon offers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Scrubby brush clinging to slopes that have not changed shape in thousands of years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The air smells faintly of dust and shaper out, cooling now after a warm spring day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere off in the dark, a coyote calls, and somewhere closer, water moves quietly against concrete.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The same low, steady murmur it has made every night for nearly two years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So familiar by now that no one left awake to hear it, gives it a second thought.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everything about the scene says permanence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everything about it says safety.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing about it gives away that in the space of about 60 seconds.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All of that is about to end.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In San Francisco, Tocanyan, a narrow gash in the dry mountains.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some 40 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The night is unremarkable.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The air is cool.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The stars are out.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A two-lane dirt road threads along the canyon floor beside a concrete wall, pale and enormous in the moonlight, holding back a reservoir of nearly 12 and a half billion gallons of water.
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[SPEAKER_00]: somewhere downstream, in small wooden bunk houses, pressed against the canyon walls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Men who have spent the day building electrical transmission lines for the southern California Edison company are asleep in their beds.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Further down still, in the towns and farming villages that line the Santa Clara River, families are finishing their dinners, tucking children into bed,
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[SPEAKER_00]: A telephone operator named Louise Geep is a loan at her switchboard in the town of Santa Paula, working her overnight shift.
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[SPEAKER_00]: None of them know that the ground beneath a structure 205 feet tall, fewer than two years old, has already begun to give way.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For weeks, the dam has been weeping.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Within trickles of water, the colour of wheat coffee have been seeping from cracks near its base, a sign, though almost no one alive understands it yet, that the foundation itself is dissolving and washing away beneath the concrete.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Only 12 hours earlier, the dam keeper, a man named Tony Harnish Vega, who lives in a small cottage just below the dam with his wife and young son.
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[SPEAKER_00]: noticed a fresh leak, darker and muddier than anything he had seen before.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He placed a telephone call up to Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The man who answered and who drove out personally to inspect it was the most famous engineer in the American West.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A self-taught Irish immigrant known to nearly everyone in the city simply as the chief.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His name was William Mulholland and for the better part of 30 years, he had been quite literally
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[SPEAKER_00]: the man who kept Los Angeles alive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He looked at the muddy water, he looked at the dam, towering and seemingly indestructible above the canyon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he declared with the easy confidence of a man who had never once been seriously wrong about water that there was nothing to worry about.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Fewer than 14 hours later, the dam failed completely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There were no eyewitnesses at the dam itself when it happened, because everyone close enough to see it die that night, also died with it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The collapse was reconstructed only afterward, stitched together from the testimony of a handful of people who happened to pass nearby in the final minutes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And from the sudden, simultaneous failure of electrical equipment downstream, which let investigators pin the exact moment of the disaster down to the second.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A carpenter named Ace Hopewell,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Riding his motorcycle home from his shift at a nearby powerhouse, passed the dam at around 10 minutes before midnight, and noticed nothing unusual.
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[SPEAKER_00]: About a mile and a half further up the canyon, above the noise of his own engine, he heard a low rumble, like boulders rolling down a hillside.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He stopped, lit a cigarette, scanned the dark slopes around him, and decided it was nothing more than one of the small ordinary landslides that were common in that part of California.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He rode on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He had, without knowing it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: just heard the beginning of one of the worst civil engineering disasters in American history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What followed in the blackness of that canyon was a sound that later survivors would struggle for the rest of their lives to describe.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some called it a roar like a hundred freight trains.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Others said it sounded like the sky itself tearing open.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the span of perhaps a minute,
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[SPEAKER_00]: the concrete wall that had been holding back the reservoir simply ceased to exist.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It did not crack and slowly crumble.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It did not give a warning groan.
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[SPEAKER_00]: that anyone could act upon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It broke apart almost all at once.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And 12 billion gallons of water enough to cover the entire city of Los Angeles to a depth of several inches were released into a steep narrow canyon all in the same instant.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The wall of water that resulted reached heights of well over 120 feet in places near the dam itself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: a churning, debris choked mass of mud, rock, broken concrete, uprooted trees, and pieces of houses.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Moving with enough force to scour bedrock and carry slabs of concrete, the size of small buildings for thousands of feet downstream.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It swallowed the work count below the dam in seconds.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It did not slow down.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It had 54 miles left to travel before it reached the Pacific Ocean.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it was going to take nearly everything in its path along with it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We will return to that night and to everything that happened in the five and a half hours that followed a little later in this story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For now, let's pause.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Let's pull back from the edge of the canyon and rewind the clock, not by hours, but by decades.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because to understand how a concrete dam in a California canyon could fail so catastrophically, and how one man could be standing at its base reassuring a frightened dam keeper just hours before it killed hundreds of people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You first have to understand who that man was, and how he came to hold so much unquestioned power over the water, and the fate of an entire American city.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the north of Ireland, on September 11th, 1855, his parents, Hugh and Ellen Mulholland were originally from Dublin, and by most accounts, the family circumstances were modest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He received only the barest formal education.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Just enough to learn his letters, his numbers, and his catacysm before he left school, entirely at around the age of 15, there would be no university for William Mulholland, there would be no engineering degree, no formal training of any kind in the profession that would eventually make him one of the most powerful, unelected men in the history of California.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everything he came to know about hydraulics, about geology, about the mathematics of moving water across a desert, he would teach himself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the evenings, after long days of physical labor, by the light of whatever lamp he could afford to keep burning.
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[SPEAKER_00]: as a young man, Mulholland went to sea.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He served for several years as a merchant sailor, an experience that, according to most accounts, began almost by accident.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He and his brother had secretly stowed away on a ship, intending to follow an uncle's family who were relocating from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The brothers were discovered part way through the voyage
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[SPEAKER_00]: By the time the ship reached Panama, their uncle's family had already moved on without them, abandoning the boys to make their own way north.
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[SPEAKER_00]: William worked his way up the Pacific Coast on a series of ships before finally landing in San Francisco.
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[SPEAKER_00]: From there, he and his brother rode on horseback down through the San Joaquin Valley, arriving in the small dusty, sun-bleached town of Los Angeles in the early months of 1877.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At that time, Los Angeles was nothing like the sprawling metropolis it would later become.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The population was somewhere around 9,000 people, a modest farming and ranching town clustered around a river that, in a dry year, could shrink to little more than a trickle.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Work was hard to come by.
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[SPEAKER_00]: According to local legend, Mulhollon's first job in the city was as a well-digger, and shortly afterward, he took a position digging and maintaining irrigation ditches for a private utility called the Los Angeles City Water Company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In Spanish and Mexican California, these open irrigation channels had been known as Zangers and the men who tended them were called Zangeros.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was about as humble a job as existed in the water business, waiting through mud, clearing debris, making sure the water kept flowing through earth and ditches that had barely changed in designs since the days of the
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[SPEAKER_00]: There is a story almost certainly embellished over the years, but too good not to repeat that captures something true about Mulholland's character, even in those earliest days.
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[SPEAKER_00]: As a young Zangero, Uncle Deep in a muddy ditch, he was approached by a well-dressed man on horseback, who asked him what, exactly, he thought he was doing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: None of your damn business.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The young Irishman supposedly snapped back, not realizing he was speaking to William Perry, the head of the entire water department.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Whether or not the exchange happened exactly that way, it captures two traits that would define Mulholland for the rest of his career.
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[SPEAKER_00]: An absolute willingness to put in hard
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[SPEAKER_00]: unglamorous physical labor, and a stubborn, almost prickly resistance to being told what to do by anyone he considered less competent than himself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That second trait, his deep discomfort with being second guessed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: would one day prove fatal to hundreds of people who had never met him and never would.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What set Mulholland apart, from the other laborers digging ditches alongside him, was not his background.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was his appetite for self-education.
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[SPEAKER_00]: After a full day of physical work, he would go home and read.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He bought used textbooks on mathematics, on hydraulics, on geology, on engineering, whatever he could afford, and he studied them late into the night, line by line, teaching himself the technical language.
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[SPEAKER_00]: of a profession that in any other circumstance would have required years of formal university training to enter.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was also by every account, a voracious reader of literature and history more broadly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of man who could quote Shakespeare from memory in one breath and discuss the structural properties of cement in the next.
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[SPEAKER_00]: his supervisors noticed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Within roughly a year of taking the lowly job of Zanjero, he had so impressed the superintendent of the water company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A man named Fred Eaton.
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[SPEAKER_00]: that he was given more responsibility.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By 1880, Malfolland was overseeing the installation of the city's very first iron water pipeline, replacing the old wooden and earthen systems that lost enormous quantities of water to leakage and evaporation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He continued to rise from there, from ditch tender, to foreman, to superintendent, climbing a ladder that, in nearly any other American city of that era, would have been reserved exclusively for men with engineering degrees from established universities.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1902, the city of Los Angeles purchased the private water company outright, folding it into a new municipal department.
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[SPEAKER_00]: William Mulholland, the self-taught immigrant who had arrived in the city with nothing, became its superintendent, and within just a couple of years, its chief engineer as well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone, from the elevator operators downtown to the members of the city council, simply called him The Chief, it was a title that fit him perfectly, because by every meaningful measure, that is exactly what he had become.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The fate of the entire water supply of a rapidly growing American city now rested in the hands of a man who had left school at 15.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the city needed him desperately, because Los Angeles had a serious almost existential problem.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was sitting in a semi-arid basin, far from any major river capable of supporting real urban growth, and its population was exploding.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At the turn of the 20th century, the city was home to roughly 100,000 people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By the 1920s, that number would balloon passed 1 million.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Los Angeles River, the only significant local water source, simply could not keep pace.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If the city wanted to keep growing, someone was going to have to find an enormous new supply of water and figure out how to move it across miles of unforgiving desert terrain to get there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That someone turned out to be William Mulholland, working in close partnership with his old mental and now political ally, Fred Eaton,
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[SPEAKER_00]: who had by this point become the mayor of Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Around 1904, the two men set out together on a scouting expedition that would change the destiny of the American Southwest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Their destination was the Owens Valley, a long fertile stretch of land, roughly 230 miles north of Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: tucked between the towering eastern wall of the Sierra Nevada mountains and the high desert beyond, fed by snow melt pouring down from some of the tallest peaks in the continental United states.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Owens River ran clean and strong, through a valley that local farmers and ranchers had spent decades turning into a genuinely prosperous agricultural community.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Mal Holland and Eaton looked at all that water, flowing untouched into a dead end lake in the middle of the desert, and they saw something else entirely, the future water supply of Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What followed has gone down in California history as the California Water Wars, and it remains nearly a century and a half later.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of the most ruthless land and resource grabs in the history of the American West.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Eaton trading on his old connections.
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[SPEAKER_00]: quietly began buying up water rights throughout the Owens Valley, often without disclosing to local sellers what the water was actually going to be used for.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He also worked closely and in a way that many historians have since described as an outright conflict of interest with a regional engineer for the federal government's reclamation service.
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[SPEAKER_00]: who was at the time supposed to be helping Owens Valley farmers build their own irrigation system.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, that federal connection helps steer the valley's water rights towards Los Angeles and away from a competing federal project that might have protected local farmers' access.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By the time Owens Valley residents began to fully understand what was happening in 1905,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Much of the water they depended on had already been quietly signed away.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing here for a moment, before we follow Mulholland and Eaton any further, to picture exactly what the Owens Valley looked like in those years, because the contrast with what it would later become
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[SPEAKER_00]: is part of what makes this story so painful.
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[SPEAKER_00]: FED by Snowmelton pouring down of some of the highest peaks in the continental United States, the valley in the early 1900s supported orchards, alfalfa fields, cattle ranchers, and small, genuinely thriving towns, an unlikely strip of green tucked between two deserts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and for a community of farmers and ranchers who had spent a generation coaxing that fertility out of difficult, high desert terrain.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The idea that all of it might be siphoned away to feed the ambitions of a city 230 miles to the south seemed when residents first heard rumors of it, almost too absurd to take seriously.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By the time they realized the rumors were entirely true,
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[SPEAKER_00]: The legal and financial groundwork had already been laid so thoroughly that there was very little left for them to do about it through ordinary means.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The city still needed federal approval to run its aqueduct across public land, and that approval was nearly blocked in Washington by a congressman representing the valley's interests.
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[SPEAKER_00]: According to the story that Mulholland himself liked to tell for years afterward, the matter was settled in a private meeting at the White House, where President Theodore Roosevelt, after hearing both sides, decided that the use that would benefit the greater number of people should win out.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The greater number of people in Roosevelt's judgment lived in Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The aqueduct's path was cleared.
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[SPEAKER_00]: While Holland threw himself into the design and construction of what would become the longest water conveyance system the world had ever seen at that time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: a gravity-fed aqueduct, 233 miles long that would carry Owens valley water entirely by the natural pool of gravity, downhill across deserts through mountain tunnels and finally into the growing city of Los Angeles without using a single pump along the way.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was an almost unimaginable engineering undertaking for its era.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The project employed roughly 5,000 men and 6,000 mules at the height of construction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Workers blasted and dug more than 140 tunnels through solid mountain rock, the longest stretching some 5 miles underground.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They built hundreds of miles of new roads, rail road track, telephone line and power transmission line.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Essentially, constructing an entire industrial supply chain through empty desert just to support the men building the aqueduct itself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The work began in 1908.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was completed in 1913 on schedule and within its original budget of roughly 24.5 million dollars and achievement that even among professionally trained engineers with university degrees would have been considered remarkable.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For a man with no formal schooling past the age of 15, it was nothing short of astonishing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On the day the aqueduct opened in November of 1913
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[SPEAKER_00]: tens of thousands of people gathered in the hills above the San Fernando Valley to watch the first rush of Owens Valley water come pouring down a concrete spillway and into Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Mulholland standing before the crowd is remembered for turning to the mayor and offering what would become one of the most famous lines in the history of California water politics.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Looking out at the torrent of water now flowing toward the thirsty city, he reportedly said simply, there it is, take it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The crowd by most accounts, roared.
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[SPEAKER_00]: From that day forward, William Mulholland was no longer simply a respected city engineer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was a legend.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was the man who had defied the desert itself and won, who had brought an entire river 230 miles across some of the harshest terrain in North America, using nothing but gravity and his own self-taught genius.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The University of California granted him an honorary doctorate with an inscription that translated roughly to he broke the rocks and brought the river to the thirsty land.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A major road winding through the hills above Hollywood would eventually be named Mulhollon Drive in his honor, a name that still appears on maps and movie credits to this day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was by the standards of his time and his city untouchable.
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[SPEAKER_00]: newspapers deferred to him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: City officials rarely questioned his technical judgment on anything related to water, because for nearly three decades his judgment had been correct.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But back in the Owens Valley, 230 miles north, the human cost of that triumph was becoming impossible to ignore.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The aqueduct had been built to supply Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But as the city continued to grow at a staggering pace through the 1910s and 1920s, it's appetite for water grew right along with it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Mul Holland and the water department began buying up still more land and water rights throughout the valley.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Often using the same piecemeal tactics that had worked so well the first time, purchasing one farm while deliberately skipping the neighbouring property.
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[SPEAKER_00]: putting long-time neighbours against one another, driving up suspicion and resentment in equal measure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: As more and more water was diverted south, the Owens Valley itself began to die, farms that had thrived for a generation began to fail for lack of irrigation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Local businesses depend on those farms, failed in turn.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Schools closed for lack of students, as families gave up and moved away.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By the mid-1920s, large portions of what had once been called the Switzerland of California, because of its lush, well-watered farmland framed by snow-capped peaks, had been reduced to a dry, abandoned landscape.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and the lake at the valley's southern end once 30 feet deep was evaporating into a dusty alkaline flat.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The remaining residents of the Owens valley increasingly desperate and increasingly convinced that legal channels would never get them a fair hearing against a city as powerful as Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Organise themselves into an irrigation cooperative, backed by two local bankers, brothers named Mark and Wilfred Waterson.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For a while, there were negotiations, lawsuits, and angry editorials in local newspapers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But in May of 1924, after the city of Los Angeles filed a sweeping lawsuit, accusing
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[SPEAKER_00]: Patience in the Owens Valley finally ran out entirely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the early hours of the morning on May 21st, 1924, a group of roughly 40 local men, many of them prominent and respected members of the Valley's farming and ranching community.
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[SPEAKER_00]: drove out under cover of darkness to a stretch of the Los Angeles aqueduct, just north of the small town of Lone Pine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They had brought with them about 500 pounds of dynamite.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Shortly after one-thirty in the morning, the charge detonated, blasting a section of the concrete aqueduct open and sending millions of gallons of citybound water, spilling harmlessly
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was the opening act of what locals would come to call their own little civil war.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it would not be the last explosion the aqueduct suffered.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Over the following several years, by some local counts, the aqueduct, or its associated infrastructure, was attacked with dynamite more than ten separate times.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Six months after that first explosion, in November of 1924, a crowd of valley residents numbering by some estimates into the hundreds, gathered at a structure on the aqueduct known as the Alabama Gates.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Led by the Bank of Mark Wattison, they seized control of the spillway gates by force and opened them, sending Los Angeles's water pouring back into the dry bed of the Owens River for several days running, rather than a tent standoff, the scene that followed had an almost festival like atmosphere.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds of valley residents camped out at the gates, sharing meals, posing for newspaper photographs, and basking in a wave of sympathetic national press coverage that painted them as small town davids standing up to a corporate bureaucratic galaith.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Mulholland, watching from Los Angeles, was reportedly furious.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But with one of his backup reservoirs holding enough water to cushion the immediate impact, the city chose not to send in armed force to retake the gates by violence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The standoff eventually ended through negotiation rather than gunfire, but it had made the city's vulnerability painfully clear to everyone watching.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A determined group of people with a truck full of dynamite could, if they wished.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Cut off Los Angeles' entire water supply at almost any point, along 230 miles of exposed desert pipeline and canal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The trouble did not end with the Alabama gates.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Negotiations between the city and the valley's representatives dragged on for years afterward.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Stalling repeatedly over the size of the reparations Los Angeles owed to the farmers and ranchers, it had effectively
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[SPEAKER_00]: whenever talks broke down, the dynamite reappeared.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In May of 1927, three years after the first blast near Lone Pine, explosives tore through another stretch of the aqueduct near the town of Mahave, a hundred miles north of Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: More blasts followed within days, and then again roughly a week after that, prompting the city to load a train load of armed detectives, carrying rifles, and send them north to guard the pipeline around the clock.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By the time the worst of the violence finally tapered off,
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[SPEAKER_00]: A local Owens Valley newspaper had documented something like 11 separate attacks on the aqueduct over the preceding several years.
31:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It was against this backdrop of repeated sabotage, of a water supply that had already proven itself vulnerable again and again to a determined handful of people with explosives that William Mulholland turned his attention to building a new kind of insurance for his city.
31:45
[SPEAKER_00]: an emergency reservoir close enough to Los Angeles that no angry farmer 200 miles away could ever threaten it.
31:54
[SPEAKER_00]: That vulnerability is the thread that connects this first chapter of our story to the next.
32:00
[SPEAKER_00]: William Mulholland, the celebrated self-made engineer who had never been seriously questioned by anyone in three decades, now had a new problem to solve.
32:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not
32:15
[SPEAKER_00]: or desert topography.
32:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a problem of trust and of vulnerability, sitting uncomfortably close to the city he had sworn to protect.
32:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And the solution he settled on, a new emergency reservoir built close to home, inside an unremarkable canyon called San Franciscoito, would turn out to be the single greatest mistake of his long and otherwise extraordinary career.
32:47
[SPEAKER_00]: part 2, hubris in concrete.
32:52
[SPEAKER_00]: After the Alabama Gates standoff, Mulholland and the leadership of the Bureau of Water Works and Supply, the agency that would eventually become known as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, found themselves facing an uncomfortable truth.
33:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The entire city of Los Angeles depended on a single
33:13
[SPEAKER_00]: 230-mile aqueduct that ran for long stretches through open desert with no protection beyond the occasional armed guard.
33:23
[SPEAKER_00]: If Owens Valley saboteurs ever succeeded in destroying a critical section of that aqueduct, particularly somewhere far from the city, Los Angeles could find itself with empty
33:41
[SPEAKER_00]: the city needed insurance.
33:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Specifically, it needed a large reservoir close to home.
33:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere it could store a substantial emergency reserve of water that would keep the city running even if the aqueduct itself were cut off entirely.
33:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Mulholland settled on a site in San Francisco
34:03
[SPEAKER_00]: A steep narrow gorge cutting through dry scrabby mountains roughly 40 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles Not far from the present day city of Santa Clarita It was in many ways a logical choice The canyon already carried a branch of the aqueduct system and was home to a pair of hydroelectric powerhouses
34:27
[SPEAKER_00]: that the water department had built years earlier to generate electricity from the falling water.
34:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Building a dam here meant the new reservoir would sit conveniently close to existing infrastructure.
34:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Far closer to the city than the vulnerable stretches of aqueduct up near Owens Valley and largely out of reach of the angry farmers and ranchers.
34:50
[SPEAKER_00]: who had been blowing holes in the system for the better part of a year.
34:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Construction on what would be called the St. Francis Dam began in the spring of 1924, and the structure was completed roughly two years later in 1926.
35:09
[SPEAKER_00]: From the very beginning, this was a project built almost entirely on the personal authority of one man.
35:17
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no independent board of outside engineers, reviewing Mulholland's calculations.
35:23
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no outside geologist hired to study the Kenyan's bedrock before construction began.
35:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The city of Los Angeles had grown so completely comfortable trusting the chief with every technical decision related to water that the idea of bringing in independent oversight for a project of this scale simply did not occur to anyone with the authority to demand it.
35:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Mulholland's own staff drew up the plans.
35:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Mulholland's own staff performed the engineering calculations.
35:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Mulhollan's own staff supervised construction, the dam that would eventually kill hundreds of people was designed, approved, built, inspected and declared safe, every single step of the way, by the same small circle of men, answering to the same single boss.
36:18
[SPEAKER_00]: who had not once in three decades been seriously second guessed by anyone.
36:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The design itself was for what engineers call a concrete gravity down, a massive solid wall of poured concrete that holds back water purely through its own enormous weight and the friction of its base against the canyon floor.
36:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The dam was meant to rise to a height of around 175 feet, creating a reservoir capable of holding about 30,000 acre feet of water, a unit of measurement that roughly describes the amount of water an average family might use across an entire year multiplied by 30,000.
37:08
[SPEAKER_00]: That was already an enormous quantity of stored water, but partway through construction
37:15
[SPEAKER_00]: and again later, Mulholland decided he wanted more.
37:18
[SPEAKER_00]: There were good reasons on the surface.
37:22
[SPEAKER_00]: For wanting a bigger reservoir, the city's water needs kept growing.
37:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The threat from Owens Valley saboteurs remained very real, and a larger emergency reserve simply meant a larger safety margin for the city in a crisis.
37:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So, not once, but twice during construction, Mulholland ordered the height of the dam raised.
37:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Each time, the wall grew by roughly 10 additional feet.
37:50
[SPEAKER_00]: For a combined increase of about 20 feet over the original design, bringing the finished structure to a final height of approximately 205 feet.
38:02
[SPEAKER_00]: considerably larger and considerably heavier than what had originally been planned and calculated.
38:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Here is where we arrive at the heart of the tragedy.
38:13
[SPEAKER_00]: the single decision that more than any other doomed the people sleeping in that canyon and downstream of it.
38:22
[SPEAKER_00]: When you make a gravity dam taller, you dramatically increase the amount of water pressing against it and you dramatically increase the total weight the foundation beneath it has to support.
38:34
[SPEAKER_00]: To remain stable, a taller dam generally needs a wider, heavier base, so that its own mass can resist the combined forces of water pressure, gravity and uplift, trying to push, slide, or tip the structure forward.
38:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Mulholland raised the height of the same France's dam twice.
38:54
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not widen the base to match.
38:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The result was a structure that looked to any casual observer, just as massive and indestructible as before, but whose actual margin of safety against sliding, tipping, and being lifted upward by water pressure from below had been significantly eroded.
39:16
[SPEAKER_00]: hidden behind 205 feet of solid looking concrete.
39:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It gets worse.
39:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The concrete itself mixed and poured by Mulholland's own crews without any outside engineering review turned out to be lighter and weaker than it should have been.
39:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Waying in at roughly 141 pounds per cubic foot,
39:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Compared to the heavier, denser concrete that more conservative engineering practice of the era would have called for in a structure of this size.
39:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The concrete was also unreinforced, meaning it contained no internal steel framework to help it resist cracking and shifting under stress, a choice that was not unusual for the period.
40:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But that left the dam, with even less of a margin for error, layered on top of every other compromise that had already been made.
40:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It might help here to slow down for a moment and think about what engineers actually mean when they talk about the safety of a structure like this because it is a simpler idea than it sounds.
40:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Every dam, every bridge, every building, is designed with what engineers call a factor of safety.
40:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Essentially a deliberate cushion of extra strength built in beyond what the structure would need under perfectly normal expected conditions.
40:47
[SPEAKER_00]: A wall that can just barely hold back the water on a calm ordinary day is not actually safe at all because conditions are never perfectly calm
41:05
[SPEAKER_00]: materials, age and weaken.
41:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Foundations settle in ways nobody fully anticipated.
41:12
[SPEAKER_00]: A generous factor of safety exists precisely to absorb all of those unpredictable variations without the structure ever coming close to genuine failure.
41:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Every individual decision made during the construction of the St. Francis Dam
41:30
[SPEAKER_00]: the added height without a wider base.
41:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The lighter, unreenforced concrete.
41:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The absence of any real geological survey, chipped away at that cushion a little more.
41:43
[SPEAKER_00]: None of those decisions alone would necessarily have doomed the structure.
41:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Layered together, they left a dam with almost no real safety margin left at all.
41:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though it looked from the outside, every bit has solid and imposing as a dam with a far healthier one.
42:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The dam had given hints of strain even during its short life.
42:07
[SPEAKER_00]: During one storm in the spring following its completion, heavy rainfall pushed the reservoir to within a few feet of the very top of the structure.
42:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Close enough that workers and engineers reportedly watched the water level with some real nervousness for a few days, though the dam held and the moment passed without any visible damage.
42:31
[SPEAKER_00]: afterward, life around the dam returned to its ordinary rhythm.
42:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The reservoir was generally kept well below its absolute maximum capacity in the years that followed.
42:44
[SPEAKER_00]: In part simply because the city's water needs had not yet grown large enough to require filling it any further.
42:52
[SPEAKER_00]: That changed in the early months of 1928.
42:56
[SPEAKER_00]: When a combination of heavy winter rains and the city's continually growing thirst finally pushed the reservoir.
43:04
[SPEAKER_00]: For the first time in the structure's existence, all the way up to the very top of its design
43:13
[SPEAKER_00]: the ground the entire structure was actually resting on, which may have been the most dangerous oversight of all.
43:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Before construction begins on any major dam, sound engineering practice calls for a careful, dedicated geological survey of the foundation rock.
43:32
[SPEAKER_00]: What kind of material is actually down there?
43:35
[SPEAKER_00]: How strong is it?
43:37
[SPEAKER_00]: How does it behave when saturated with water for years at a time?
43:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And are there any hidden weaknesses, fault lines, or ancient landslides buried beneath the surface that might not be obvious just from looking at the canyon walls?
43:54
[SPEAKER_00]: This was not some obscure or cutting edge idea in the 1920s.
44:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Other engineers of Mulholland's own era were already writing and publishing recommendations that any major dam side should be examined by in the words of one contemporary, an expert practical geologist, someone trained specifically to study rock formations,
44:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Mulholland, supremely confident in his own decades of hands-on experience and entirely unaccustomed to being told he needed outside help, skipped this step almost entirely.
44:36
[SPEAKER_00]: He and a visiting geology professor made a brief visit to the canyon before construction began.
44:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Little more than a walk through, nothing resembling a serious scientific study.
44:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Then construction proceeded.
44:51
[SPEAKER_00]: had a trained geologist actually examined San Franciscoito Canyon in detail before the first bucket of concrete was poured.
45:00
[SPEAKER_00]: That geologist would very likely have discovered two separate and separately terrifying problems.
45:07
[SPEAKER_00]: One on each side of the canyon, exactly where the two ends of the dam were going to be anchored.
45:13
[SPEAKER_00]: On the western side of the canyon, the dam's foundation rested against a reddish formation of conglomerate rock and sandstone, threaded through with thin veins of a mineral called gypsum.
45:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Gypsum has a particular and dangerous property, it dissolves in water.
45:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Slowly, patiently, year after year, as the reservoir behind the dam stayed full and water seaped down into this western rock formation, the gypsum veins were dissolving away, weakening the rock from the inside out, and leaving it increasingly soft.
45:52
[SPEAKER_00]: crumbly and structurally unsound, almost like a sugar cube left sitting in a glass of water.
45:59
[SPEAKER_00]: On the eastern side of the canyon, the geology was different, but no less dangerous.
46:05
[SPEAKER_00]: There, the foundation consisted of a kind of metamorphic rock called Micah Shist, heavily layered, riddled with cracks and fault lines, and interspersed with a soft, slippery mineral called Tauk.
46:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Far more troubling than the rock's composition, however, was its history.
46:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Unbeknownst to Mal Holland and his crews, the entire eastern hillside, into which the dams eastern wing was anchored, had in the ancient geological past, already slid downhill once before.
46:40
[SPEAKER_00]: In a massive prehistoric landslide thousands of years earlier, the dam had been built directly into the scar of that old landslide.
46:50
[SPEAKER_00]: When shist of this kind becomes saturated with water over a period of years, it can lose much of its internal strength and friction, essentially reactivating old ancient lines of weakness that had been dormant, but never truly healed for millennia.
47:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Making matters even more precarious, this same stretch of canyon sat extremely close to a known geological fault line,
47:19
[SPEAKER_00]: in the earth's crust, that ran roughly along the boundary, where the soft western conglomerate met the eastern chist, directly beneath where the dam itself would stand.
47:31
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, William Mulholland built one of the largest dams in the western United States, with one wing anchored into rock that would dissolve when wet, and the other
47:43
[SPEAKER_00]: anchored into the scar of an ancient landslide that would reactivate when wet, with a geological fault line running through the middle of it all, and he did so without ever commissioning a proper geological study that might have revealed any of it.
48:02
[SPEAKER_00]: For two years, the dam held.
48:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The reservoir behind it slowly filled with water.
48:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Year after year, the gypsum dissolving on one side,
48:13
[SPEAKER_00]: the ancient landslide softening on the other, while in Los Angeles, the man responsible for it all continued to be celebrated as the greatest water engineer the American West had ever produced.
48:29
[SPEAKER_00]: There were warnings, they were subtle, easy to misread, and in the case of the most important warning of all dismissed within a matter of hours.
48:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Cracks had appeared in the dam's concrete surface periodically since construction.
48:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of fine, vertical cracking that often happens naturally as large pores of concrete cure and shrink over time, and which engineers of that era.
48:55
[SPEAKER_00]: including Mulholland himself, generally regarded as cosmetic rather than structurally alarming.
49:02
[SPEAKER_00]: More troubling were occasional small leaks of water, along certain seams and joints in the structure, which Mulholland and his staff also tended to write off as routine and expected for a structure of this size.
49:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The ordinary seepage that any large reservoir produces,
49:23
[SPEAKER_00]: and that any properly designed dam should be able to tolerate indefinitely.
49:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The reservoir behind the St. Francis dam reached its full capacity for the very first time in its short life.
49:39
[SPEAKER_00]: On March 7th, 1928, just five days before the disaster, filled with roughly 38,000 acre feet of water.
49:49
[SPEAKER_00]: considerably more than the dam's original design had ever called for.
49:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost immediately, the dam keeper, Tony Harnish Vega, who lived in a small cottage with his family at the base of the structure, began noticing something different.
50:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The water seeping from the west and side of the dam was no longer running clear.
50:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It had taken on a distinctly muddy brownish colour.
50:15
[SPEAKER_00]: to a modern engineer trained in soil mechanics, that single detail, muddy water, rather than clear water, would be an unmistakable five alarm warning sign.
50:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Clear sea pigeon simply means water is vining its way through small gaps in the rock or concrete.
50:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Generally, a manageable and expected condition.
50:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Muddy sea pigeon means something far more dangerous.
50:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The water isn't just passing through the foundation anymore, it is actively carrying pieces of the foundation away with it, hollowing out the ground beneath the dam from the inside, a slow, invisible process that engineers today call internal erosion or piping.
51:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Every gallon of muddy water, leaking out from under that dam, represented a little more of its foundation being washed away into the canyon below.
51:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Weakening the structures grip on the earth a little more with each passing hour.
51:21
[SPEAKER_00]: On the morning of March 12th, 1928, Harnish Vega noticed a new leap.
51:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Darker and more troubling than any he had seen before on the western side of the dam.
51:33
[SPEAKER_00]: He telephone Mulholland directly.
51:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Within a short time, Mulholland, along with his trusted assistant chief engineer, a man named Harvey Van Norman, drove out personally from Los Angeles to inspect the site.
51:49
[SPEAKER_00]: A measure of just how seriously the chief still took his responsibilities.
51:54
[SPEAKER_00]: even at the height of his fame and authority.
51:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The two men arrived at the canyon, examined the newly.
52:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Walked the length of the dam and concluded that what they were looking at, while perhaps worth continued watching, did not represent any immediate danger.
52:11
[SPEAKER_00]: By most accounts, they believed the muddy color was likely the result of water passing through the dam's expansion joints and picking up loose sediment along the way.
52:24
[SPEAKER_00]: An explanation that in hindsight.
52:27
[SPEAKER_00]: badly underestimated just how much of the dam's actual foundation was already being carried away.
52:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Mulholland and Van Norman left the canyon at around mid-morning, returning to their normal business in Los Angeles.
52:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Confident that the structure they had built together was still as it had
52:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the last professional inspection, St. Francis Dam would ever receive.
52:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Less than 14 hours later, at two and a half minutes before midnight, with the gypsum dissolved away on one side, and the ancient landslide reactivated on the other, with a base two narrow for a structure that had grown 20 feet taller than originally planned.
53:19
[SPEAKER_00]: with concrete that was lighter and weaker than it should have been, and with a foundation that had spent days hollowing itself out beneath the feet of a sleeping dam keeper and his family.
53:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The St. Francis Dam gave way entirely, all at once, in the dark.
53:35
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened in the hours that followed is the part of this story that took the longest to fully understand, because as we touched on earlier,
53:46
[SPEAKER_00]: almost no one close enough to witness the collapse itself, survived to describe it.
53:52
[SPEAKER_00]: In our next chapter, we are going to follow the wave itself, mile by mile, all the way from that canyon to the edge of the Pacific Ocean and meet some of the people, the dam keepers family,
54:06
[SPEAKER_00]: the construction workers sleeping in their bunkhouses, the telephone operators and motorcycle officers who tried desperately to outrun a flood in the dark, whose lives were caught up in the worst few hours of California's 20th century.
54:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Part three, the midnight deluge.
54:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's go back now to that moment, two and a half minutes before midnight.
54:35
[SPEAKER_00]: On March 12th, 1928.
54:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Investigators would later be able to pin down that precise instant with surprising accuracy, not because anyone saw the dam break, but because of something far more mundane.
54:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The dam's failure tore through nearby electrical lines that fed power to the surrounding region.
54:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And the exact moment those lines went dead was recorded automatically by equipment at distant power stations.
55:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It is one of the strange and slightly haunting details of this story that the precise time stamp of one of the worst disasters in California history survives today, not because someone witnessed it.
55:21
[SPEAKER_00]: But because the lights flickered somewhere on a power grid, dozens of miles away.
55:26
[SPEAKER_00]: In the seconds after the dam gave way, the very first structure in its path was the small cottage, where dam keeper Tony Harnish Vega lived with his wife and his young son.
55:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The family was almost certainly a sleep when the wall of water arrived, and they were among the very first people to die that night.
55:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Swept away with an instance of the structure they had spent years watching over, finally failing beneath them.
55:55
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no time for a warning, no time for a phone call, no time even to fully wake up.
56:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The man who had first noticed the dangerous muddy leak.
56:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The only person besides Mulholland himself who might have grasped just how serious the situation had become was killed in the opening seconds of the very disaster he had tried in his own limited way to warn against.
56:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost immediately downstream from the dam site.
56:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Set a work camp belonging to the Southern California Edison power company.
56:32
[SPEAKER_00]: A cluster of simple wooden bunk houses where roughly 150 construction workers were housed while they built new electrical transmission lines through the canyon.
56:45
[SPEAKER_00]: These men had no warning whatsoever.
56:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The wall of water still well over 100 feet high this close to its source.
56:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Hit the camp with the full undeminished force of a freshly collapsed dam, crushing the bunkhouses,
57:01
[SPEAKER_00]: and burying or sweeping away, nearly everyone inside, before a single man could climb out of bed.
57:09
[SPEAKER_00]: 84 of those workers died that night.
57:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The single largest concentrated loss of life anywhere along the floods entire 54 mile path, almost the entire population of one small, sleeping work camp.
57:25
[SPEAKER_00]: gone in a matter of seconds.
57:28
[SPEAKER_00]: From there, the flood continued its descent down San Francisco Tocanyan, gathering debris as it went.
57:35
[SPEAKER_00]: broken chunks of concrete from the dam itself, some weighing many tons, uprooted trees, boulders, the wreckage of homes and outbuildings, all of it churned together into a dark, grinding, unstoppable mass, moving down a steep narrow gorge in the middle of the night.
57:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The small community of Casteic, sitting near the mouth of the canyon where it opened out
58:04
[SPEAKER_00]: was directly in the flood's path.
58:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Witnesses who arrived afterward would describe the community as having been scoured almost perfectly clean, as though it had been wiped from the landscape with a single enormous hand, structures, fences, and farmland all carried away together, leaving behind little more than bare scrubbed earth.
58:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The flood had emptied out of the confines of San Francisco Canyon and spread into the much wider Santa Clara River Valley, along gently sloping agricultural corridor that ran the rest of the way toward the ocean.
58:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The water lost some of its terrifying initial height, as it spread out across the wider valley floor, though it remained by any reasonable measure, an enormous and lethal wall of moving water and debris.
59:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Still capable of leveling homes, uprooting orchards, and sweeping away anyone caught in its path.
59:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It continued moving its speeds that investigators later estimated up to 18 miles per hour.
59:18
[SPEAKER_00]: A pace that meant most people, even those who somehow received word of the danger, had only minutes.
59:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes only seconds to get themselves to higher ground.
59:30
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened next is, in many ways, the most remarkable part of this entire story.
59:38
[SPEAKER_00]: because in an era with no emergency broadcast systems, no sirens and no way to instantly alert an entire region to a catastrophe unfolding in real time.
59:51
[SPEAKER_00]: A handful of ordinary people almost entirely on their own initiative managed to save what was likely hundreds.
1:00:00
[SPEAKER_00]: perhaps thousands of lives simply by refusing to run for their own safety until they had warned as many of their neighbours as they possibly could.
1:00:11
[SPEAKER_00]: As word of the disaster reached the towns and switch boards further down the valley, telephone operators, almost all of them women working solitary overnight shifts in small town telephone exchanges,
1:00:25
[SPEAKER_00]: found themselves facing an agonizing choice.
1:00:29
[SPEAKER_00]: They could abandon their posts immediately and flee for higher ground themselves, or they could stay exactly where they were.
1:00:37
[SPEAKER_00]: At a switchboard sitting directly in the floods path and use what little time remained to call as many households and businesses as possible, warning them to get out before the water arrived.
1:00:54
[SPEAKER_00]: in the town of Santa Paula, a night operator named Louise Geet.
1:00:59
[SPEAKER_00]: stayed at her switchboard for as long as she possibly could.
1:01:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Placing call after call to homes and farms in the valley below, warning families to wake up, get out of bed, and move to higher ground immediately.
1:01:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Buying precious minutes for people who otherwise would have had no idea anything at all was wrong until the water was already at their door.
1:01:23
[SPEAKER_00]: She was not the only operator to make that choice that night.
1:01:27
[SPEAKER_00]: up and down the valley, in town after town, similar scenes played out in dark and telephone offices.
1:01:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Women working the phones as long as they dared, racing against a flood that was by that point.
1:01:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Already moving faster than most of the people they were calling could possibly run.
1:01:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Alongside the telephone operators, a small number of motorcycle police officers took on an
1:01:55
[SPEAKER_00]: riding directly ahead of the flood waters, weaving through the darkness on the same narrow valley roads the water itself was following, banging on doors, shouting warnings, and physically rousing sleeping families out of their homes before the wall of water caught up with them.
1:02:14
[SPEAKER_00]: One California Highway Patrol Officer in particular, a man named Thornton Edwards,
1:02:20
[SPEAKER_00]: became something of a local legend in the aftermath of the disaster, for racing ahead of the flood for mile after mile, stopping at house after house to wake residents personally, earning himself the nickname the Paul Revere of the St. Francis flood.
1:02:39
[SPEAKER_00]: a reference, of course, to the famous midnight rider of the American Revolution, who rode ahead of British troops to warn colonial towns of their approach, where Edwards and others like him managed to get ahead of the water in time, entire households survived who otherwise almost certainly would not have.
1:03:02
[SPEAKER_00]: but there were limits to what warning calls and motorcycle dashes through the dark could accomplish.
1:03:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Against a flood, moving at nearly 20 miles an hour, with no advance notice whatsoever for the first several towns in its path.
1:03:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The community of Pyro was hit hard, with homes and farmland along the river banks simply swept away.
1:03:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Fill more, a larger farming town further down the valley, suffered some of the most severe destruction of the entire disaster, as the flood tore through neighborhoods built close to the river, levelling houses, uprooting orchards, and carrying away entire blocks of what had been.
1:03:46
[SPEAKER_00]: only hours earlier, ordinary residential streets.
1:03:51
[SPEAKER_00]: In Santa Pola, despite the desperate efforts of operators like Louise Gipay, large sections of the town near the riverbank were devastated as well, homes reduced to splinted wreckage, streets buried under feet of mud and debris.
1:04:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Smaller communities, including Bardstale and Satikoy, suffered comparable destruction
1:04:15
[SPEAKER_00]: their population scattered into the darkness, some clinging to rooftops or trees as the water carried them along others never given any chance to escape at all.
1:04:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Some, against every reasonable expectation, survived the water itself.
1:04:34
[SPEAKER_00]: One elderly resident,
1:04:36
[SPEAKER_00]: and 80-year-old man was reportedly thrown directly out of his own bed when the flood crashed into his house, swept into the open current, still half asleep.
1:04:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Certain, in those first disorienting seconds that he was about to drown, he was carried for some distance through the dark, tumbling along with the debris of his own home.
1:05:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Before, as he would later describe it,
1:05:04
[SPEAKER_00]: A hand reached out of the chaos and pulled him to safety, a stranger who had somehow also ended up in the flood and who happened to grab hold of him as they were both swept past.
1:05:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Stories like his scattered and fragmentary as they are, offer some of the only first hand glimpses we have of what it actually felt like to be inside that flood.
1:05:32
[SPEAKER_00]: rather than simply watching its aftermath from dry ground, and they are a reminder that even amid the worst of it, ordinary people reached out for one another in the dark.
1:05:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The flood did not stop at any of these towns.
1:05:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It continued on, mile after mile.
1:05:50
[SPEAKER_00]: through the agricultural heart of Ventura County, carrying with it the wreckage of everything it had already destroyed upstream, fragments of houses from filmor mixed with debris from the work camp far up in San Francisco, Canyon.
1:06:06
[SPEAKER_00]: all of it grinding slowly toward the sea by some later estimates.
1:06:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The flood swept away or buried nearly 24,000 acres of prime farmland in citrus and walnut orchards.
1:06:22
[SPEAKER_00]: an agricultural disaster that would leave economic scars across the valley for years to come, even setting aside entirely the human cost.
1:06:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Survivors described searching for their families and neighbours in mud sometimes several feet deep, struggling to recognise their own streets, or in many cases their own homes, which had simply ceased to exist.
1:06:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It took more than five hours by most careful reconstructions for the floodwaters to finally complete their 54-mile journey from the base of the St. Francis Dam to the Pacific Ocean.
1:07:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, dissipating into the surf somewhere near President Day Oxnard in the early morning hours around 5.30.
1:07:10
[SPEAKER_00]: As the first gray light of dawn was beginning to creep over the valley,
1:07:15
[SPEAKER_00]: By the time the sun came up fully on the morning of March 13th, 1928, the full scope of what had happened overnight was only just beginning to become clear and what daylight revealed was almost beyond comprehension.
1:07:32
[SPEAKER_00]: entire neighborhoods that had existed the previous evening were simply gone, replaced by featureless expanses of drying mud littered with wreckage.
1:07:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Rescue workers, many of them volunteers from towns that had escaped the worst of the destruction, waded through the debris fields searching for survivors.
1:07:54
[SPEAKER_00]: and far too often for bodies.
1:07:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Some victims were found buried under feet of silt, close to where their homes had once stood.
1:08:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Others had been carried far beyond the boundaries of their own towns, swept downstream alongside total strangers who had been sleeping, just hours earlier, in entirely different communities.
1:08:16
[SPEAKER_00]: a number of bodies were never found in the immediate aftermath at all, having been carried all the way to the Pacific Ocean and lost to the open sea.
1:08:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Some reportedly washing a shore weeks or months later as far south as the Mexican border.
1:08:34
[SPEAKER_00]: others recovered, almost unbelievably.
1:08:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Decades afterward.
1:08:39
[SPEAKER_00]: As construction crews and farmers working the valley periodically uncovered additional remains, well into the 1950s, and even in at least one documented case, as late as the 1990s.
1:08:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Because so many victims were never formally identified.
1:08:59
[SPEAKER_00]: and because the valley at the time was also home to an unknown number of migrant farm workers, whose presence often went entirely unrecorded in official population counts.
1:09:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The true death toll from the St. Francis Dam disaster has never been precisely established, even nearly a century later.
1:09:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The official count taken in the months immediately following
1:09:29
[SPEAKER_00]: subsequent research, accounting for additional remains discovered in later years, and for the likely undercount among transient and migrant workers in the valley, has pushed most modern historical estimates considerably higher, with figures commonly cited anywhere between
1:09:51
[SPEAKER_00]: whatever the precise final number truly was, and it is entirely possible that no one will ever know for certain.
1:09:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The St. Francis Dam disaster stands as the second greatest loss of life from a single disaster in the entire recorded history of the state of California.
1:10:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Suppressed only by the great earthquake that devastated San Francisco in 1906.
1:10:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The work of simply accounting for the dead stretched on for months.
1:10:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ventura County coroner at the time, a man named Oliver Riddon, along with his teenage son, who had come home from boarding school for an Easter break, only to find himself spending much of the following summer, assisting his father with this grim task, kept meticulous handwritten records of everybody recovered along the Santa Clara River.
1:10:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Those records eventually counted 231 bodies retrieved from Ventura County alone, with dozens more recovered from Los Angeles County, and roughly 100 additional people listed simply as missing, never found at all.
1:11:04
[SPEAKER_00]: As late as that August, months after the disaster, a group of ranch hands clearing debris further up the river,
1:11:12
[SPEAKER_00]: discovered the charred remains of three more victims, a man, a woman and a child.
1:11:18
[SPEAKER_00]: In the ashes of a bonfire they had built to burn flood wreckage.
1:11:22
[SPEAKER_00]: A discovery so unexpected and so devastating that it was still being noted in official records nearly half a year after the water had receded.
1:11:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Even that was not the end of it.
1:11:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Additional remains, almost certainly belonging to victims of the flood, continued to turn up for decades afterward.
1:11:40
[SPEAKER_00]: recovered by chance during construction projects and farming work through the 1950s.
1:11:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The 1970s and the 1990s, the canyon and the valley below it, returning fragments of that one terrible night to the surface for the better part of a century.
1:12:00
[SPEAKER_00]: In the months that followed,
1:12:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The city of Los Angeles moved to compensate the survivors and the families of the dead, eventually paying out more than $7 million in restitution and property claims, an enormous sum for the era.
1:12:15
[SPEAKER_00]: covering everything from destroyed homes and farmland.
1:12:19
[SPEAKER_00]: To funeral costs for victims whose families had lost everything else along with them.
1:12:24
[SPEAKER_00]: No amount of money, of course.
1:12:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Could undo what had happened in that valley on the night of March 12th.
1:12:32
[SPEAKER_00]: But the speed and scale of the city's financial response stood in notable contrast to its later reluctance to fully reckon in public.
1:12:42
[SPEAKER_00]: with exactly how the disaster had been allowed to happen in the first place.
1:12:46
[SPEAKER_00]: In the cold light of that first morning, as exhausted rescue workers continued combing through the mud for survivors.
1:12:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Word of the disaster was already racing back up the valley toward Los Angeles and toward the office of the one man whose decisions
1:13:03
[SPEAKER_00]: made over the preceding several years, had set every piece of this tragedy into motion.
1:13:09
[SPEAKER_00]: William Mulholland, the celebrated chief, the self-taught immigrant who had once tamed an entire desert with nothing but gravity and sheer force of will, arrived at the scene of the wreckage himself.
1:13:25
[SPEAKER_00]: in the early hours of that morning, walking the same canyon where, less than a day earlier, he had personally declared a leaking crumbling down to be perfectly safe.
1:13:37
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened to William Mulholland in the weeks and months that followed, as the full scope of the disaster became clear, and the inevitable search for someone to blame began in earnest is where our story turns next.
1:13:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Part 4, The Inquest and Ruin.
1:13:58
[SPEAKER_00]: In the day's immediately following the disaster, the city of Los Angeles moved with surprising speed to begin investigating exactly what had gone wrong.
1:14:08
[SPEAKER_00]: This was not purely a matter of civic responsibility.
1:14:12
[SPEAKER_00]: There were political stakes involved as well.
1:14:15
[SPEAKER_00]: California's congressional delegation in Washington was at that very moment, working to secure federal approval for an enormous new dam on the Colorado River.
1:14:27
[SPEAKER_00]: a project that would eventually become known as the Hoover Dam.
1:14:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The thought that a major concrete dam built by the state of California's own most celebrated engineer had just catastrophically failed, killing hundreds of people, threatened to derail the entire Colorado River project before it had even broken ground.
1:14:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Suddenly, getting to the bottom of what had happened at St. Francis was not just a matter of public safety.
1:14:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a matter of protecting the future of damn building itself all across the American West.
1:15:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Within days of the collapse, no fewer than eight separate investigative panels had been convened to study the wreckage and determine a cause.
1:15:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The governor of California, a man named Clement Calhoun
1:15:22
[SPEAKER_00]: led by a respected dam engineer who also happened to be serving as a consultant to the very bolder Canyon project that now hung in the balance.
1:15:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The Los Angeles City Council convened its own panel.
1:15:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The water department launched an internal review.
1:15:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The district attorney's office and the county coroner each opened their own investigations as well.
1:15:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And a coalition of farmers and landowners along the Santa Clara River deeply skeptical that the city would investigate itself fairly.
1:15:57
[SPEAKER_00]: hired an independent geologist of their own to conduct a separate study.
1:16:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Investigators descended on the ruined canyon within days.
1:16:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes within hours of the water finally receding, photographing the wreckage, sampling the rock formations on both abutments and interviewing every surviving witness they could find.
1:16:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost every one of these investigations, despite arriving at the scene from different directions and with different institutional interests, converged on broadly similar conclusions.
1:16:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Though they disagreed, sometimes sharply.
1:16:38
[SPEAKER_00]: on the precise sequence in which the dam had actually failed.
1:16:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Some believed the Western conglomerate weakened by dissolving gypsum had given way first, undermining the entire structure from that side.
1:16:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Others, including the independent geologist hired by the farmers along the river,
1:16:59
[SPEAKER_00]: argued that the eastern abutment anchored into the ancient reactivated landslide had actually failed first, with the rest of the dam collapsing in a chain reaction that followed.
1:17:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Their remains, even among historians and engineers who have studied this disaster for decades since, some genuine disagreement over exactly which side gave way first and the truth is that we will likely never know for certain.
1:17:30
[SPEAKER_00]: But on the broader question, the question of why a structure that had seemed so permanent, so indestructible, had crumbled within two years of its completion, the investigators were in remarkable agreement, the foundation underneath the entire dam, on both sides of the canyon, had simply never been adequate to support a structure of this size.
1:17:56
[SPEAKER_00]: and no one with the authority to stop construction had ever properly studied that foundation before building on top of it.
1:18:04
[SPEAKER_00]: While the engineers and geologists argued over precise mechanisms in technical reports, the more immediate and more public reckoning was unfolding in a Los Angeles County courtroom.
1:18:16
[SPEAKER_00]: where a coroner's inquest had been convened to determine, formally and for the official record, the cause of all those deaths.
1:18:26
[SPEAKER_00]: While the engineers and geologists argued over precise mechanisms in technical reports, the more immediate and more public reckoning was unfolding in a Los Angeles County courtroom, where a coroner's inquest had been convened to determine formally and for the official record the cause of all those deaths.
1:18:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The hearings drew enormous public attention, packed galleries of reporters and grieving relatives crowded into a room never designed to hold a story of this size.
1:19:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Every word of testimony recorded and printed in newspapers up and down the state the very next morning.
1:19:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Harvey Van Normen, the assistant chief engineer who had stood beside Mell Holland at the dam only hours before its collapse, took the stand as well, describing in careful, technical detail exactly what the two men had seen and concluded during that final inspection.
1:19:29
[SPEAKER_00]: testimony that, however precise, could do nothing to change the plain fact that they had looked directly at a dying dam and pronounced it healthy.
1:19:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It was here under oath.
1:19:44
[SPEAKER_00]: in front of a jury and a room full of reporters that William Mulholland would offer what remains to this day, one of the most strikingly honest and self-condemning pieces of testimony ever given by a powerful public figure in the aftermath of a disaster he was responsible for.
1:20:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Mulholland did not hide.
1:20:07
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not retreat behind a team of lawyers.
1:20:10
[SPEAKER_00]: did not deflect blame onto his subordinates.
1:20:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Did not attempt to muddy the technical record, with confusing jargon designed to obscure his own role in the decisions that had led to the dam's collapse.
1:20:25
[SPEAKER_00]: By every contemporary account, he appeared before the inquest, a visibly broken man, gray and exhausted, and he spoke with what reporters in the room described as raw, unguarded grief.
1:20:39
[SPEAKER_00]: asked about the disaster and the lives it had claimed, he is remembered as telling the jury in substance that the only people he envied in connection with the entire catastrophe were the dead, because they, at least, were spared the burden of having to live with what had happened, pressed further on the question of responsibility, he made no effort whatsoever to spread the blame elsewhere.
1:21:08
[SPEAKER_00]: don't blame anyone else.
1:21:10
[SPEAKER_00]: He told the jury.
1:21:12
[SPEAKER_00]: You just fasten it on me.
1:21:14
[SPEAKER_00]: If there was an error in human judgment, I was the human.
1:21:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It is difficult to overstate how unusual this kind of testimony was, then or now, from a man of Mulholland's statue.
1:21:28
[SPEAKER_00]: He had spent 30 years building a public reputation
1:21:38
[SPEAKER_00]: a man whose judgment on matters of water had never once been seriously questioned.
1:21:44
[SPEAKER_00]: He could have with considerable plausibility pointed to the unpredictable geology of the canyon, to the limitations of engineering science in the 1920s.
1:21:57
[SPEAKER_00]: to the work of his subordinates who had drawn up specific calculations under his general direction.
1:22:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, standing in front of the very public that had once practically worshipped him, he accepted the blame entirely and personally, with no qualifications attached.
1:22:18
[SPEAKER_00]: After weighing the testimony, the physical evidence and the conclusions of the various
1:22:25
[SPEAKER_00]: the coroner's jury reached its verdict.
1:22:28
[SPEAKER_00]: They concluded that the collapse of the St. Francis Dam had resulted from a failure of the foundation rock on which it had been built.
1:22:37
[SPEAKER_00]: compounded by errors in engineering judgment in the design and construction of the structure itself.
1:22:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Crucially, however, the jury stopped well-short of recommending any criminal charges against Mulholland or anyone else connected with the project.
1:22:55
[SPEAKER_00]: They found negligence in other words.
1:22:58
[SPEAKER_00]: but not anything they were willing to characterise as a deliberate crime.
1:23:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Still, the jury's written findings included one line that would be quoted again and again in the decades that followed.
1:23:12
[SPEAKER_00]: A sentence that managed to capture in a single stroke exactly what had gone wrong with the entire process by which the St. Francis Dam had been allowed to exist in the first place.
1:23:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The construction of a municipal dam, the jury wrote, should never be left to the sole judgment of one man, no matter how eminent that man might be, no matter how eminent.
1:23:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, in its own way, a devastating epitaph for everything Mulholland had built his career upon.
1:23:45
[SPEAKER_00]: For 30 years, the entire system of water governance in Los Angeles had functioned on the principle that William Mulholland's personal judgment on any matter related to water, engineering or geology simply did not need to be checked by anyone else.
1:24:03
[SPEAKER_00]: That system had built an aqueduct that transformed an entire region.
1:24:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It had also, in the end, built a dam that killed hundreds of people in their sleep, and the jury's verdict made unmistakably clear that those two outcomes were not separate stories.
1:24:22
[SPEAKER_00]: They were the same story, told twice, once with a triumph and ending, and once with a tragic one.
1:24:29
[SPEAKER_00]: and the common thread running through both of them was a complete absence of independent oversight over one extraordinarily confident, extraordinarily unchecked man.
1:24:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Mulholland was never charged with any crime, but the public reckoning, even without a criminal conviction attached to it, was swift and largely irreversible.
1:24:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Within months of the disaster, he stepped down from his position as chief engineer and general manager of the water department he had led for more than two decades, formally ending at the age of roughly 73, a career
1:25:12
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not disappear from public life entirely, continuing for a time in an advisory capacity and even contributing his expertise to early discussions surrounding the design of the Colorado River Project, the very damn whose congressional approval had nearly been derailed by his own disaster.
1:25:32
[SPEAKER_00]: But the malholand of the years that followed the collapse was by every account from those who knew him, a profoundly diminished figure, both in public standing and in private spirit.
1:25:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Friends and colleagues described him.
1:25:51
[SPEAKER_00]: in his final years as withdrawn, often somber, a man who carried the weight of that one March night for the rest of his life and who rarely, if ever, spoke about the disaster again in public.
1:26:07
[SPEAKER_00]: William Mulholland died on July 22nd, 1935 at the age of 79.
1:26:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Roughly seven years after the dam he had built with his own hands and his own hard-won expertise had killed several hundred of the people he had spent his life claiming to serve.
1:26:30
[SPEAKER_00]: He was buried in Los Angeles, the city he had arrived in.
1:26:34
[SPEAKER_00]: as a penniless Irish immigrant fewer than 60 years earlier and the city he had through equal measures of genius and hubris transformed into one of the largest and most powerful urban centers on the entire planet.
1:26:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It would be easy and not entirely wrong.
1:26:55
[SPEAKER_00]: to end this story there, with one man's quiet, broken, final years, standing in for the last in cost of his greatest mistake.
1:27:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But the full legacy of the St. Francis Dam disaster extends considerably further than the life of any single individual.
1:27:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And in many ways, it is in that wider legacy that the truest meaning of this entire story can be found.
1:27:22
[SPEAKER_00]: In the immediate aftermath of the collapse, the California State Legislature moved with unusual speed to make sure that nothing remotely like the St. Francis Dam could ever happen again.
1:27:36
[SPEAKER_00]: In August of 1929, just under a year and a half after the disaster, the legislature created what eventually became the California Dam's safety program, a regulatory body
1:27:49
[SPEAKER_00]: specifically tasked with reviewing and approving the plans for any new dam constructed anywhere in the state, examining the safety of dams that already existed and supervising both construction and ongoing maintenance to ensure that no single engineer, regardless of reputation or seniority.
1:28:13
[SPEAKER_00]: could ever again build a structure of this scale entirely on the strength of his own unchecked judgment.
1:28:19
[SPEAKER_00]: That same year, the state also established a formal board to license and register civil engineers formally requiring that significant construction projects be supervised by credential professionals.
1:28:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Operating under recognized standards, rather than relying purely on decades of informal, self-taught experience.
1:28:43
[SPEAKER_00]: However, impressive that experience might genuinely be.
1:28:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Crucially, these new regulations
1:28:50
[SPEAKER_00]: specifically addressed the exact failure that had doomed the St. Francis Dam, the complete absence of independent geological review.
1:29:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Going forward, any major dam built in California would be required to undergo a genuine dedicated study of its foundation by a qualified geologist before construction could begin.
1:29:14
[SPEAKER_00]: A study capable of identifying exactly the kind of hidden
1:29:19
[SPEAKER_00]: dissolving gypsum veins, ancient reactivated landslides, buried fault lines that had gone completely undetected at San Francisco, this requirement did not stay confined to California.
1:29:34
[SPEAKER_00]: As word of the disaster and its causes spread through the engineering profession nationally and internationally,
1:29:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The standard of mandatory independent geological review for major dam projects became increasingly accepted as basic best practice across the country and eventually around much of the world.
1:29:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Later that same year, in the summer of 1928, engineers from six different countries met and formed an international organisation devoted specifically to establishing rigorous shared technical standards for the safe design and construction of large dams everywhere, an effort that traced its origins directly back to the lessons of San Francisco Canyon.
1:30:27
[SPEAKER_00]: was the very project whose political fate had been hanging in the balance at the moment the St. Francis Dam collapsed.
1:30:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The great Dam then being planned for the Colorado River.
1:30:39
[SPEAKER_00]: where the earlier project might once have proceeded with something closer to the same informal single-engineer oversight that had doomed Mulholland's dam.
1:30:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The Colorado River project moved forward instead with extensive, rigorous, independent geological surveys of its foundation
1:31:00
[SPEAKER_00]: conducted by multiple outside experts, working under far greater institutional scrutiny than anything Mulholland had ever submitted to.
1:31:11
[SPEAKER_00]: That dam eventually named the Hoover Dam after the president who oversaw its early planning would go on to become one of the most celebrated and enduring engineering achievements in American history, a structure that has now stood safely for nearly a century.
1:31:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It is genuinely difficult to separate that long, unbroken record of safety, from the bitter lessons the engineering profession had just been forced to learn.
1:31:40
[SPEAKER_00]: At enormous human cost, in a canyon less than two years old, less than 200 miles away.
1:31:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Back in San Francisco, to Canyon itself, the physical remains of the St. Francis Dam,
1:31:54
[SPEAKER_00]: lingered for a time as an unintended and increasingly unwelcome tourist attraction.
1:32:01
[SPEAKER_00]: A single massive section of the dam centre had remained standing after the collapse, towering and strangely intact amid the surrounding wreckage, and local newspapers had taken to calling it simply the tombstone.
1:32:17
[SPEAKER_00]: For more than a year, curious visitors made their way out to the canyon to see it for themselves, climbing over the ruins, posing for photographs, and in at least one documented case falling to their death from the unstable structure.
1:32:34
[SPEAKER_00]: In May of 1929, city officials had the remaining section dynamited and demolished entirely, partly out of safety concerns, and partly one suspects.
1:32:46
[SPEAKER_00]: out of a desire to finally put the physical reminder of the disaster out of sight.
1:32:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The reservoir itself was never rebuilt at that location.
1:32:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Years later, a smaller replacement reservoir was constructed nearby in a neighboring canyon, and decades after that, a considerably larger modern dam was eventually built not far away.
1:33:12
[SPEAKER_00]: holding many times more water than the St. Francis Dam ever had.
1:33:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But designed and constructed under an entirely different regulatory regime than the one that had allowed its predecessor to fail.
1:33:26
[SPEAKER_00]: For the better part of the 20th century,
1:33:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The St. Francis Dam disaster occupied a strange and somewhat uncomfortable place in the public memory of California, widely studied by engineers and historians, but far less well known to the general public, than its scale and its death toll would seem to warrant.
1:33:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Some have suggested that the disaster, unlike a natural catastrophe such as an earthquake, raised uncomfortable questions about institutional failure, unchecked authority, and a beloved civic heroes' personal culpability, questions that are growing optimistic young city was not always eager to keep revisiting.
1:34:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not until relatively recently in 2019 that the site of the disaster was formally designated as a national memorial by the United States Congress.
1:34:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally establishing official permanent recognition for the hundreds of people who lost their lives that night.
1:34:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And for the broader lessons, their deaths ultimately taught an entire profession.
1:34:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Historians and engineers have continued returning to this story for nearly 100 years now and that continued attention is itself worth noting.
1:34:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Detailed academic histories of the disaster drawing on archival material from the water department, the coroner's office and the various investigative commissions have been published decades apart.
1:35:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Each one, adding new layers of detail to our understanding of exactly how a structure this large could fail so completely, so quickly, with so little warning.
1:35:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Engineering schools still use the same Francis Dam as a case study today, not to mock the men who built it, but to teach future engineers a lesson that remains every bit as relevant now, as it was in 1928.
1:35:31
[SPEAKER_00]: and even a long, genuine track record of success, are never on their own, a substitute for independent verification.
1:35:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere in nearly every modern dam safety regulation written anywhere in the world since then, in language about required geological surveys,
1:35:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Mandatory Third Party Review and License Professional Oversight.
1:35:57
[SPEAKER_00]: There is an unstated debt to a damn keeper's cottage in San Francisco, Tocanyan, and to the hundreds of people.
1:36:05
[SPEAKER_00]: who never had the chance to learn what killed them.
1:36:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, the site itself draws a slow but steady trickle of visitors, hikers and history enthusiasts who make the drive out from Santa Clarita to walk the canyon floor where the dam once stood.
1:36:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Pieces of broken concrete, some of them enormous.
1:36:26
[SPEAKER_00]: still lie scattered through the brush, exactly where the flood deposited them, weathered now by nearly a century of sun and rain, but otherwise largely undisturbed.
1:36:37
[SPEAKER_00]: A small interpretive marker stands near the site, and efforts have continued in recent years to build a more permanent visitor centre to properly tell this story to a wider audience.
1:36:49
[SPEAKER_00]: For most of the 20th century, you could drive right past that quiet stretch of canyon and never know that anything had happened there at all.
1:36:58
[SPEAKER_00]: That, slowly, is beginning to change.
1:37:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So what in the end are we left with sitting here in the dark?
1:37:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Nearly a century removed from that two and a half minutes before midnight in San Francisco Canyon.
1:37:14
[SPEAKER_00]: We are left, certainly, with a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked authority.
1:37:21
[SPEAKER_00]: However earned, however well-intentioned, however genuinely brilliant the person wielding it might be.
1:37:28
[SPEAKER_00]: William Mulholland was not a villain in any simple sense.
1:37:32
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not greedy, was not careless out of laziness, was not indifferent to the safety of the people downstream of his down.
1:37:40
[SPEAKER_00]: By every measure available to us, he was a man of extraordinary talent, extraordinary discipline, and extraordinary dedication to a city that he had, by any fair accounting.
1:37:55
[SPEAKER_00]: served brilliantly for the better part of three decades, and yet that very brilliance validated again and again over 30 years of one success after another, eventually curdled into something close to infallibility in his own mind and in the minds of everyone around him, a conviction, never quite spoken aloud, but clearly present in every decision that was made.
1:38:22
[SPEAKER_00]: that William Mulhollon's judgment alone was sufficient, that no outside geologist, no independent review board, no second opinion was truly necessary when the chief had already decided something was safe.
1:38:37
[SPEAKER_00]: We are left too with a more universal observation about the nature of these kinds of failures generally.
1:38:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The St. Francis Dam did not fail because of a single dramatic error.
1:38:50
[SPEAKER_00]: A moment of obvious negligence that any reasonable observer could have spotted from a distance.
1:38:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It failed because of a long accumulation of smaller decisions.
1:39:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Each one individually defensible, even reasonable in isolation, raising the dam's height to increase the city's water security, made sense on its own terms, trusting an experienced self-taught engineer with three decades of success.
1:39:20
[SPEAKER_00]: made sense on its own terms.
1:39:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Interpreting a muddy leak as ordinary seepage, rather than as a sign of catastrophic internal erosion, was an honest, if ultimately tragic, misjudgment, rather than an act of recklessness.
1:39:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It was only when all of these individually reasonable decisions were layered on top of one another, compounding silently for years, hidden behind 205 feet of solid-looking concrete that they added up to a structure that could fail almost without warning, killing hundreds of sleeping people in the middle of the night, and we are left, finally, with the lives themselves.
1:40:04
[SPEAKER_00]: the damn keeper and his young family killed in their own home in the very first seconds of the collapse.
1:40:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The 84 construction workers who never woke up in their bunk houses.
1:40:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The night telephone operators who chose to stay at dark and switch boards rather than save themselves.
1:40:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Bying minutes of warning for neighbours, they would never personally know they had saved.
1:40:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The motorcycle officer who rode directly into the path of an oncoming flood to bang on strangers' doors, and the hundreds upon hundreds of ordinary farmers, shopkeepers, children,
1:40:43
[SPEAKER_00]: and families across Pyro, Filmoor, Santa Paula, Bardstale, and Satikoi who simply went to bed on an unremarkable spring evening and never woke up at all.
1:40:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It is worth remembering every now and then, that the safety we so often take for granted, the dams that hold, the infrastructure that simply works year after year, without our ever having to think about it, is not an accident and it is not free.
1:41:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It was paid for in this particular case by several hundred people who never knew the price
1:41:25
[SPEAKER_00]: on an ordinary night in the spring of 1928.
1:41:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Every modern dam built in California since that night.
1:41:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And a great many built well beyond California's borders as well.
1:41:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Carries within its design, the lessons that were purchased at such a terrible cost in San Francisco, to Canyon.
1:41:49
[SPEAKER_00]: That's where we'll leave it for tonight.
1:41:54
[SPEAKER_00]: has been for nearly a century now.
1:41:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The wildflowers and scrub brush slowly reclaiming a landscape that was once scoured down to Bear Rock in the space of a single night.
1:42:07
[SPEAKER_00]: If you ever find yourself driving the back roads north of Santa Clarita, there is a small, easy-to-miss memorial marking the site where the Dan once stood, easy to pass without noticing, holding the memory of one of the worst nights in California's history.
1:42:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, as always, for spending this time with me here on Sleepless History.
1:42:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Good night.