The collapse of St. Francis Dam was one of California’s most searing tragedies
The St. Francis Dam was hailed as an engineering masterpiece in the 1920s, a triumph over nature that would ensure the water needs of rapidly growing Los Angeles.
Then it burst. Just before midnight, 90 years ago today, an avalanche of water barreled down the pitch-black canyon and continued more than 50 miles to the Pacific, obliterating everything in its way.
The dam’s collapse on March 12, 1928, stands as California’s deadliest disaster aside from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.
Jon Wilkman, author of a book about the disaster called “Floodpath,” said the warnings came late or not at all in the farming towns along the path of destruction — including Castaic, Santa Paula, and Fillmore.
People were asleep. Some didn’t have phones. Others were unaware even of the existence of the big dam upstream, straddling the San Francisquito Canyon near present-day Santa Clarita.
When an enormous roar echoed in the distance, some people thought it might be thunder. But it was growing louder. “And then,” Wilkman said, “they open the door of their house and they’re facing a 140-foot wall of water.”
Frantic alarms were raised as the wave, moving initially at nearly 20 miles an hour, gobbled up houses, trees, livestock, and human bodies.
Witnesses recounted a woman in an evening dress riding on top of a water tank. One man driving his family to safety noticed the lights on at a neighbor’s house. He ran over to warn them, only to return and find that his family had been swept away.
The water reached the Pacific at about 5:30 a.m. Shortly after, the sun rose to reveal unthinkable carnage: roughly 1,200 homes destroyed and more than 400 people dead. Only a central portion of the dam remained, rising like a massive tombstone.
Official inquiries followed. Public fury fell upon William Mulholland, the trailblazing water czar who oversaw the dam’s construction. A woman who lost her entire family posted a sign with the words “Kill Mulholland” painted in red.
During a coroner’s inquest, Mulholland sobbed in court and muttered, “I envy the dead.”
The dam burst was blamed on a failure of the rock anchoring the dam. Mulholland was spared criminal culpability, but his reputation was shattered. He resigned months later and died, sad and broken, at age 79 in 1935.
The St. Francis disaster became a wake-up call that ushered in higher standards of dam building. Decades later, however, some cited the 2017 crisis at Lake Oroville as evidence that complacency had been allowed to fester.
The lessons learned from the St. Francis tragedy will be among the topics in a series of events this week marking its 90th anniversary. Residents in Santa Paula planned to gather for a vigil Monday night. A children’s choir will sing and 16 candles will be placed in a park, each a memorial to the lives lost.
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