Page 14 - sg_vigilanceforever1994

14 VIGILANCE FOREVER - 75 years of The Signal 1919-1994

■ St. Francis tragedy

Dam of doom

Mulholland's

pavvn in vvater

vvars killed 450

people vvhen it

burst in 1928

By ELIZABETH GLAZNER
Signal staff writer

THeman wandered in with the rest of
them, and after some time, quietly took a
seat at the piano. The hotel keeper gath-
ered her own daughters' shoes and tried
to fit them to some of the lost children
whose dothes had been stripped off by
the water's current. There were mothers
crying for ·missing children, · neighbors
searching the crowd for friends and fam-
ily, teams of power company workers who
watched most of the men in their camp
wash away to sea. Bodies clothed only in
mud were laid out at the dance hall down
the street, suddenly a makeshift morgue,
while the stone-faced man at the piano
began to play.

ailey Haskell made $4 a day Signal file photo
while helping to build the St. Francis Dam in The St. Francis Dam as it appeared March
B San Francisquito Canyon. 11, 1928, the day before it burst, sending a
"Back then that was a whole lot of money," said wall of water down San Francisquito
Haskell, who was 14 when the project came to town, in Canyon, killing at least 450 people.
1924.
Haskell was one of hundreds employed to dynamite Santa Clarita Valley. It was the first long-distance
trees and clear acres of brush to make way for the 12- water system of its kind, rivaled only by the Panama
billion-gallon reservoir. He also helped cut steel rein- Canal. But because of the sensitivity of water rights
forcement bars for the massive dam. issues, the colossal project was undertaken in virtual
"There wasn't a whole lot of discussion about the secrecy.
dam, except that it was gonna bring us jobs," said "It was violence in the best tradition," writes Charles
Haskell in a 1993 interview. F. Outland in his 1963 book, "Man-Made Disaster, the
To its builders, the St Francis Dam was capable of Story of the St Francis Dam," the most conclusive
bringing much more than water to the 3,000 people in report on the subject
the Santa Clarita Valley, and to Los Angeles over the "Captured headgates, seizure of Los Angeles repre-
hill, which had a population of 114,000 in 1924. sentatives by masked men, forcible rides out of the val-
Both populations were rapidly rising as a result of ley under armed escort, illegal stopping and searching of
the Los Angeles-Owens Valley Aqueduct, which since automobiles and wholesale dynamiting of the aqueduct
1913 had been delivering water to the infant metropo- made the Owens Valley fight the most magnificent
lis from Northern California via a 225-mile pipeline. water brawl of the time."
The aqueduct's designer was the unbridled William Buoyed by his reputationas the patron saint of dam
Mulholland, chief engineer of Los Angeles' Bureau building, Mulholland proceeded anyway with the St.
of Water Works and Supply (later the Department of Francis, the 19th and last dam he was to build It plugged
Water and Power) from 1886 until he retired in 1928. the pastoral San Francisquito Canyon, which had been
Mulholland was despised by Owens Valley ranchers the main route between Los Angeles and Bakersfield
and farmers, who were unaware that the chief's Mulholland chose the canyon because of its favorable
acquisition of 307,000 acres of their valley includ- topography - a natural narrowing of the canyon down-
ed the water in it stream with a broad upstream platform, which would
The aqueduct routed that water through the Please see ST. FRANCIS, page 16