♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
At two-and-a-half minutes
before midnight on the 12th of March 1928, the lights in Los Angeles
flickered. William Mulholland was asleep
at his home near Windsor Square. He didn't notice. WILLIAM DEVERELL:
Mulholland runs an agency that is in charge
of providing water for Los Angeles. He's a civil servant. Nonetheless, he's
extraordinarily powerful, and he knows it. ERIKA BSUMEK:
Mulholland is the man
who brought water to the city
of Los Angeles. With the aqueduct, with the dams, he forges Los Angeles
into a major city. NARRATOR:
Meanwhile, in a canyon 40 miles
northwest of the city, Ace Hopewell pulled his
motorcycle to the side of the road. He passed the St. Francis Dam
about a mile back, Mulholland's most recent
creation: a wall of concrete
20 stories high holding back 12 billion gallons
of water. As he lit a cigarette, Hopewell heard a sound
in the distance. (rumbling in distance) The St. Francis Dam
was collapsing. It's 54 miles to the ocean. As many as 10,000 people are downstream from this. They could actually feel the
vibration and they could hear it coming. It felt like an earthquake. They saw their neighbors
running out. And then they realized. But by that time,
the water was just upon them. Most of the people who were
killed probably never knew what
was happening to them. DEVERELL:
That wall of water carried
bodies out to the Pacific Ocean. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
It was one of the worst civil
engineering disasters in American history, rooted in a national drive to harness nature
and remake the West. The question is not whether water should have been brought
to Los Angeles, but rather how it was done. Because the consequences
are so devastating. BSUMEK:
When infrastructure fails, engineers use the disaster
to learn from and rebuild. But the failure of the
St. Francis Dam is as much a social-political story
as it is an engineering story. And when there's
a social disaster, we need to think about, where
did we go wrong as a society? ♪ ♪ JOSÉ ALAMILLO:
When I was a young boy, my parents would always warn me
not to go to the river. They would tell the story of
La Llorona, the woman that would be crying
along the riverbed, searching for her children. ♪ ♪ There's definitely a haunting
of the river even to this day. ♪ ♪ And I never understood until I
was much older why there were ghosts along the
Santa Clara River. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
The St. Francis Dam disaster began in a flush of hope. On a perfect November morning
in 1913, 40,000 Angelenos gathered at a
new landmark called the Cascades to inaugurate one of the wonders
of the modern world. The Los Angeles Aqueduct
was a perfect emblem for the city of tomorrow: more than 200 miles of pipes
and canals carrying enough water for
two-and-a-half million people, ten times the current
population, from the Sierra Nevada Mountains
to the outskirts of the city. MARIA MONTOYA:
The aqueduct does hail a new
beginning for Los Angeles. It very much follows on the idea
of Manifest Destiny, but now it's not just about
land. It's about controlling the
resources to make the American West
the kind of civilization they want it to be, the kind of
place that they want it to be. NARRATOR:
The "Los Angeles Times"
proclaimed, "A mighty river has been brought
out from the mountain wilderness, an
inexhaustible supply of water." And there was more. They realized that they could
use this flow to turn generators and generate
90% of the electricity that was needed by Los Angeles. NARRATOR:
With ample water
and clean power, L.A. would lead the way
to a better future, far from the crowded cities
of the East. ♪ ♪ "No black pillars of smoke shall blind the sun,"
the "L.A. Times" promised, "no army of grimy workers "shall feed the
red-mouthed furnaces, "for the river,
bound with hoops of steel, shall generate the power
for numberless industries." BSUMEK:
"We will be a modern city. "We're not going to be like
those older places "that have these older social
problems. We can remake ourselves
in this new way." Having, quote-unquote,
"ended the frontier era," the West is now going to be won or lost through its cities. The rise of faith in the city,
it's very optimistic. NARRATOR:
The mastermind behind the
aqueduct was the head of the
Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply, an Irish immigrant who never
finished grade school. "Well, I went to school in
Ireland when I was a boy," William Mulholland told
a reporter, "learned the three Rs
and the Ten Commandments-- "or most of them-- made a
pilgrimage to the Blarney Stone, received my father's blessing,
and here I am." J. DAVID ROGERS:
He starts out as a ditch digger. I mean,
you can't start out any lower, you know, than that. But that's what made him such
a good field general. He understands the working man and how to marshal their
efforts. That was what he lived for. Angelenos really loved him because he was a working-class
immigrant who had made good. He was the hearty Irishman, the man of the people. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
But the settlers in the
Owens River Valley, the source of L.A.'s water, saw William Mulholland
very differently. As far as they were concerned,
he was taking their river, leaving farms and towns
to wither on the vine. They had been kept in the dark
about the aqueduct as the city quietly bought
up their land and water rights. D.C. JACKSON:
The Owens Valley was a rural,
high-desert community that had begun settled by
Euro Americans in the 1860s. Their fortunes were tied
to the Owens River. WILKMAN:
The water wasn't stolen, but it was not acquired all
in the up-and-up. They certainly didn't tell
them that their plan really was to run the water down to
Los Angeles. NARRATOR:
The anger in the Owens Valley would haunt Mulholland
to his grave, but for most Angelenos,
any qualms about the project were eclipsed by its
breathtaking scale and ambition. ♪ ♪ DEVERELL:
It is a gargantuan
construction project: placing metal aqueduct
structures in and around valleys, arroyos, sheer mountains, long, flat, dry expanses of the California landscape. It's astonishing. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ JACKSON:
To think that you could bring
that water over 200 miles, that's just
extraordinary at the time. It would be a huge project
today. (car horns honking) NARRATOR:
On that November day in 1913, when Angelenos gathered
at the Cascades to celebrate the opening
of the aqueduct, they were captivated by
the city's glittering future. Shortly after 1:00 p.m., Owens River water
was released down the Cascades for the first time. (crowd cheering) WILKMAN:
The people just rushed
toward the water. They had brought tin cups
to dip into the water as it was coming
down, to drink the first water
from this man-made river. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
As the crowd rushed to marvel
at their new river, Mulholland perfectly
captured the moment. "There it is,"
he shouted from the stage. "Take it." ♪ ♪ ROGERS:
The aqueduct was a game changer. It made Los Angeles the fastest-growing city in the
United States. BSUMEK:
The aqueduct teaches Los Angeles
that it can do bold
and amazing things. Suburbs are springing up
all over, and migrants are pouring into
Los Angeles. It was a moment of great
excitement. ♪ ♪ That's not to say this works
for everybody by any stretch of the
imagination. There's racial segregation
in law and in practice. There's violence meted out
to non-whites. So, it's not a alchemy of fulfillment and happiness
that spreads to everybody. But the mythic qualities of it
are palpable. ♪ ♪ The dream was: come here,
perhaps start anew. NARRATOR:
But as Los Angeles boomed, Southern California
was drying up. By the time the population
blew past the one million mark in the early 1920s,
the aqueduct flow had been cut almost in half by years
of drought. ROGERS:
Just think about it:
they were looking out 50 years, and they were out of water
in ten. Surprise, surprise. That's what California
is full of. It's full of surprises. What Mulholland created
was an illusion of abundance. And so, the people of the city
of Los Angeles keep using more water instead of responding
to drought conditions. LOUIS WARREN:
There are lawns everywhere. Spectacular flower gardens. The amount of water poured
onto those lawns is pretty astounding. NARRATOR:
In order to quench L.A.'s
thirst, the Bureau of Water went on
another buying spree in the Owens Valley, laying claim to most of the
remaining water and further undermining
the region's economy. There's a tremendous amount
of anger growing in the Owens Valley. There's a sense that
the community is really being destroyed. ♪ ♪ ST. JOHN:
To see this distant city turning into
a glamorous metropolis... ...and using their water, must have been incredibly
frustrating. Arrogance absolutely plays
a big role. There is a lot of resentment
that is driven by the decisions and the attitudes of people
like Mulholland. BURKE:
The farmers in the
Owens River Valley weren't perceived
as equal citizens. They are imperial subjects. NARRATOR:
The anger only deepened when
it became clear that much of the
Owens River water wasn't going to Los Angeles
at all. Even as the rest of
Southern California was drying up,
the city was providing vast amounts of water to farms and orchards in the
San Fernando Valley, which belonged in large part
to a syndicate of the most powerful men
in the city. WARREN:
Did the city really need
to provide landowners in the San Fernando Valley
with that much water? Well, it turns out that the
owner of the "Los Angeles Times" and some other associates
have bought a lot of land there. Those wealthy landowners
made a killing. MONTOYA:
It's very easy to picture
Mulholland as corrupt, but he wasn't doing this because
he was getting paid off to do it or he was making money off
of it. I think, for him,
it's really about his own vision and his power and his ability to remake nature. I think that's
what's driving him. NARRATOR:
The threat of shortages accelerated the next phase
in Mulholland's master plan. WARREN:
In a dry year, if there isn't a lot of snow
in the Sierra Nevada, the aqueduct won't deliver
as much water to Los Angeles. So they need storage, big reservoir, so you could fill
it up in the wet years, and in the dry years,
it'll tide you over. NARRATOR:
In the summer of 1922, Mulholland decided to build
seven new dams near the southern end of the
aqueduct, including a pair of majestic
concrete structures worthy of a great metropolis: the Hollywood Dam, in the hills
overlooking Los Angeles, and biggest of all,
the St. Francis Dam, in a canyon 40 miles northwest
of the city. ST JOHN:
The St. Francis Dam
and the Hollywood Dam are similar structures;
they were both built with the same design, a tribute to engineering triumph
and the control of nature, and it's impossible not to think that he saw it as a tribute
to him, as well. NARRATOR:
Plans were drawn up
in Mulholland's offices in the fall of 1922. 20 years before,
the city had required that a group of experts review
his plans for the aqueduct. But that was then. JACKSON:
This is that sense that he had earned the right to sort of do what he wanted
to do. ROGERS:
This is the second-largest
storage reservoir in Southern California. It should have had peer review; at least some people outside
his organization reviewing it and looking at it. But nobody's questioning him
by the time you get to 1922. Nobody. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
In April of 1924, the first construction
workers arrived in the San Francisquito Canyon. It had been 12 years
since Mulholland's crews ran the southern end of
the aqueduct through here, and three years since they finished building
a generating station called Powerhouse 2 about a mile downstream
from the new dam. The Powerhouse 2 workers
and their families lived in wooden bungalows
clustered around the plant at the bottom of the canyon. Now their quiet little community was overrun with men
and machinery. But just as the project was
gearing up, it suddenly took on
a new urgency. On the 21st of May 1924, a massive explosion destroyed
a section of the aqueduct in Owens Valley. The damage was repaired within
a few days, but as far as the activists
in the valley were concerned, the fight was just getting
started. MONTOYA:
The aqueduct was a disaster
for Owens Valley. The people who lived there
lost almost all of their water. It became such a desolate place. It was a complete undoing of their livelihoods
and their households and their families. JACKSON:
To the city and to Mulholland,
this is terrorism. You are destroying
the water supply for this major urban center. NARRATOR:
Six months after
the first attack, over a hundred men seized the aqueduct control gates in
Owens Valley, opened up the valves, and released the water
onto the parched soil. They wouldn't restore
the aqueduct flow, they said, until the city agreed to pay
reparations and limit any further expansion
of the project. ♪ ♪ By noon the next day, hundreds
of men, women, and children had joined the siege, which had come to look more
like a huge barbecue. ♪ ♪ Families came with picnics, businesses up and down the
valley closed for the occasion, and a group of musicians
arrived, courtesy of movie star Tom Mix, who was shooting a Western
nearby. The siege lasted four days, long enough to make news
around the world. To Mulholland's annoyance, much of the coverage presented
the settlers' actions as a noble struggle
against the corruption and power of Los Angeles. ♪ ♪ WILKMAN:
It became known in the press as
"the Little Civil War." And it was intense,
and it was violent. WARREN:
There are multiple layers
of irony here. When the settlers of the
Owens Valley came in the 1850s and '60s, they displaced
the Northern Paiute people, the Native people
who lived in the Owens Valley. NARRATOR:
Before contact, the Paiutes' homeland had
stretched across 30 million acres of the
Western interior. Although most preferred a
nomadic lifestyle, one group settled in
Owens Valley, where the snowmelt coming off
the Sierra Nevada Mountains provided a reliable source
of water. WILL COWAN:
The Paiutes there, they were
building irrigation canals going back to 1000 A.D., so they could take the runoff from the back side of the
Sierra Nevada and they could grow different
types of indigenous crops. Of course, during the conquest, there's an influx of white
Americans to the West Coast. For the Owens Valley Paiute,
in particular, there's tension over kidnapping
of Paiute children and other types of really
atrocious things, and there's a series of wars. In the long run, it's,
it's the Paiute who are removed from their ancestral lands
as the settlers come there and basically take over the
irrigation system that the Paiutes had built
a thousand years before. So what the settlers did to
Native people, the City of Los Angeles
is in a sense doing to them: taking the water away. NARRATOR:
The Los Angeles Water Bureau
picked up where the Paiute Wars left off, insisting that any Paiutes
who remained in the valley should be removed through
a land swap for humanitarian reasons. "Some are living in dugouts
or crudely constructed shacks that are a disgrace
to American ideals," an internal report observed,
before coming to the point. "Nearly all of them use
immense quantities of water." COWAN:
Is it a morality tale? It's always a morality tale. But of course,
it depends on whose morals and whose perspective. BSUMEK:
Dispossession is really woven
into the fabric of the American West. It's the philosophy that forms the entire foundation of
the settlement of the region. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
By the fall of 1924, the canyon was a hive
of activity. Trucks ferried sand and gravel to a small concrete plant at
the downstream face of the dam. A crane lifted
the liquid concrete. Workers directed it into
position. Over the next 16 months, that
same operation would be repeated tens of thousands of times. A gravity dam's
a very simple concept. It's a retaining wall that
you're building to have something of much
greater weight and stability than the forces
you're putting against it. And this is water,
this is concrete. So a dam that has
a triangular shape should be able to hold back a
lake that's of infinite length. NARRATOR:
As work proceeded on the dam, Mulholland decided to make
it taller than originally planned. ROGERS:
Mulholland had made a promise that he wanted enough storage to contain one year's water
supply for Los Angeles. Because the population was
increasing so much every year, the demand was greater
and greater. And so Mulholland increased the height of the dam
ten feet the first year that they were
in construction, and then the second year,
he did it again, without increasing
the base width. What's important here is, okay, you can raise the height
of the dam. But if you do this, there's going to be more
pressure on the concrete, and you better make sure that
it's thick enough to withstand that. NARRATOR:
In fact, Mulholland was
distracted by an even more ambitious
enterprise. MONTOYA:
The Boulder Dam project, which becomes the Hoover Dam, is an undertaking that
even dwarfs the aqueduct: to take water from the
Colorado River, move it to various places along
Southern California. Mulholland is a consultant
to that project. It feeds into his vision of what he thinks Southern California
can become. NARRATOR:
Even as the biggest dam
he'd ever built was rising in the
San Francisquito Canyon, Mulholland was on the road
for weeks at a time, mapping out routes for
a Colorado River aqueduct and lobbying in Sacramento
and Washington. All the while,
behind the St. Francis Dam, the water was rising,
the pressure building. JACKSON:
When it's completed in the
spring of 1926, there's almost
no public notice of it. There are a number
of dynamite attacks that take place along
the aqueduct. I think they don't want
to draw attention to it. NARRATOR:
The official reticence
did nothing to pacify the settlers in
the Owens Valley. On May 27, 1927, an explosion ripped out one of the largest
siphons in the aqueduct. A few nights later, another 60-foot
section was destroyed. By the end of June,
there had been three more attacks
on the aqueduct, and the city was alive
with rumors of a plot to bomb the St. Francis Dam. The authorities had yet
to make a single arrest. No one in the
valley was talking. Hundreds of armed
guards were sent in. To locals, they were
an occupying army. Despite the worries
about sabotage, communities that lay
in the potential flood path were never consulted
about the dam. The Santa Clara River Valley
stretched 50 miles from the San Francisquito
Canyon to the Pacific Ocean, a patchwork of citrus
farms and oil wells that was a magnet for
newcomers seeking work. ALAMILLO:
There were some groups that had
been there for generations, back from the Spanish era and the Mexican period
of the 19th century. But many were starting
to arrive, really, in the early 1900s, and especially during
the Mexican Revolution, like my grandfather. NARRATOR:
Half the people in Santa Paula
were of Mexican descent, most of them recent arrivals
working in the citrus industry. GLORIA VELASCO:
My great-aunt and her husband were hardworking people. Poor. So they had to follow the crops. Soledad, being the oldest child, stayed behind in camp
taking care of her siblings. ♪ ♪ When they would come home,
they lived in Santa Paula. And it was very close
to the river bottom. ALAMILLO:
Not a lot of people knew of the St. Francis Dam. Even the ranchers who owned
a lot of the orchards, they didn't even know
the dam was being built until the cement
was being poured. You can imagine that the
Mexican community had no idea. JACKSON:
That's what's so weird. I mean, it's this
major structure. And it's just fascinating
that there's so many people who don't really have any
sense that it's there. ROGERS:
Mulholland gets a call, I think it was a Monday, from Tony Harnischfeger,
who's his dam keeper. NARRATOR:
Harnischfeger was highly
attuned to the dam's condition. He and his family
lived in the shadow of the enormous structure. Over the last year,
Harnischfeger had watched as a series of cracks
appeared in the dam. ROGERS:
Those cracks went all
the way through the dam. There were at least
four of them. And Mulholland plugged
all of the cracks with oakum
on the downstream face. That was the absolute
worst thing you could do, because now you're taking that
hydraulic pressure and you're putting it on
the interior of the dam. NARRATOR:
Harnischfeger was on edge. The reservoir had been
filled to capacity for the first time
five days before. Water was leaking under
the dam's west side. ROGERS:
Mulholland goes out there right away to
take a look at it. And what he told
Harnischfeger was, you know, "There's no active erosion "occurring of the
dam foundation. This is a lot about nothing." NARRATOR:
Mulholland was
back at the office in time for a late lunch. But with every passing minute, the internal stresses on
the dam were multiplying. At around 11:20 p.m., the structure finally
began to give way. A huge crack opened up
on its upstream side. JACKSON:
This is where that extra height really makes a difference. It's kind of like, you know, straws on a camel's back. ROGERS:
This dam did not
have the capacity to stop the loads
that were being put on it. The dam was actually tilting
one half of a degree. NARRATOR:
Already the St. Francis Dam
was fractured by cracks, and its central section
was tilting forward. Then another defect in Mulholland's design
came into play. JACKSON:
What about water that
seeps under the base of the dam and then begins
to push up at the bottom, what was termed uplift? The dam had sort of pushed
up off of its foundation. NARRATOR:
Like most modern dams, the St. Francis included
relief wells to prevent uplift, but only in its center section. The wings of the dam were
beginning to slip away. Around 11:30 p.m.,
a massive chunk of the dam, severed by cracks and weakened
by uplift, blew out. Intensely pressurized
water began jetting through
the resulting gap. The entire east wing was
on the verge of collapse. WILKMAN:
Over time, water from
the reservoir had begun to saturate the east abutment, which was made up
of this geological formation called schist, and it's layers of slate
literally stacked on each other. If it begins to be on an angle,
as the hillside was, and water gets in between
these slate-like layers, it slides like
a deck of cards. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
At two-and-a-half minutes
before midnight, the entire hillside
under the east wing collapsed into the dam. WILKMAN:
The dam was sliding on its base. And the west side crumbled down. And it collapses. NARRATOR:
Tony Harnischfeger
probably saw it happen. Ace Hopewell,
smoking a cigarette a mile up the road,
heard it in the distance. The landslide
severed the wires carrying power to Los Angeles. The lights in
the city flickered. ♪ ♪ JACKSON:
This huge flow, close to a million
cubic feet per second, just rushes down the canyon. For Harnischfeger
and his family, "Oh, my God!" There's no way you're going
to withstand that. (water rushing) (insects chirping,
sound of water absent) NARRATOR:
The sound of the collapsing dam took a little less
than seven seconds to reach the cluster of cabins around
Powerhouse Number 2, where it woke Lillian Curtis. She looked out to see "a misty haze hanging
over everything." Suddenly, Curtis grabbed her
husband and screamed, "The dam has broke!" ROGERS:
It's a colossal force
coming down the canyon, not like anything your senses
would ever have understood. NARRATOR:
Curtis scrambled up
the side of the canyon with her three-year-old son,
while her husband went back to fetch the girls. ♪ ♪ ST. JOHN:
That people had enough time to try to save their families and then to fail is, is a horrifying idea. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
40 minutes after the collapse, the deluge burst out of
the canyon and turned into the valley of the
Santa Clara River, where 140 Edison
Company workers were sleeping at an encampment. "The confusion,"
one man remembered, "was indescribable." Fewer than half of them
would see the sun rise. ♪ ♪ WARREN:
Most of the people
who were killed probably never knew what
was happening to them. They just knew
they were drowning. NARRATOR:
In Santa Paula, ten-year-old Soledad Luna
heard shouting outside. (men shouting) VELASCO:
Two motorcycle policemen
were going around yelling, "Agua, agua!" My great-grandfather
thought it was crazy. "It hasn't been raining--
what water is he talking about?" So my family didn't really
pay much attention until other neighbors
started running. NARRATOR:
Precious minutes ticked by as Soledad's father
and her Uncle Sisto packed the family's
possessions before finally gathering her young cousins. VELASCO:
Sisto got his children, put the four oldest
in the flatbed of the truck, and his wife was sitting
in the cab of the truck holding their infant
when the water hit. As the truck toppled over,
they could see the little children's arms flailing
in the water, trying to grasp, and crying out. NARRATOR:
With nowhere to go, Soledad's mother
grabbed her four children and huddled them on the bed. The first impact tore
their flimsy house apart. Miraculously,
Soledad, her mother, and her three siblings
were carried away on the crest of the flood,
their bed a life raft. But Soledad's luck seemed
to run out when her hair became entangled in
the branches of a tree. Soledad watched her
mother and siblings float away into the darkness. VELASCO:
Soledad screamed, and her mother tried
to grab her and couldn't. She couldn't see. It was, it was dark. But she could hear
animals drowning, people screaming. And that was so
terrifying to her. NARRATOR:
As the flood carried
Soledad's mother downstream, it spread across
the landscape until the leading edge was
almost two miles wide. Even so, it still
had power enough to demolish railroad
and highway bridges. Along the way, it had
picked up all the debris of the economy of the
Santa Clara River Valley. Orchard trees, cattle. And as you get to the ocean, oil from oil drilling. So it's this mix of sludge and rocks and parts
of steel bridges and bodies and animals
in a kind of an oil slick. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
At 5:25 in the morning, at the mouth of
the Santa Clara River, the floodwaters finally
washed into the sea. ♪ ♪ (winds gusting) ALAMILLO:
The next day was gloomy, overcast. There was no color
at all that morning. My grandfather walked around. He remembered houses
just broken into pieces. Trees uprooted and
thrown everywhere. Cadavers lined up
like piles of wood. Mothers crying,
in tears, sobbing. WILKMAN:
There were bodies
strewn everywhere. Boy Scouts would go
out with little flags, and when they found a body, they would put
the flag in the ground, and then a recovery crew
would come and pick up and carry the body
away on stretchers, put them on the back of trucks,
and take them into town. NARRATOR:
Rescuers found Lillian Curtis, her son, and a neighbor
on a hillside overlooking the ruins
of Powerhouse 2. Everyone else
in the town was dead. ♪ ♪ VELASCO:
They found my Great-Aunt Irene where the mouth of the river
empties into the Pacific Ocean. She was cold and wet, scared, not able
to speak the language. (people talking in background) ♪ ♪ Soledad was found many, many, many hours
later hanging from the tree. ♪ ♪ It traumatized her so much that
to the very day that she passed, she could still remember
the man's name that found her. It was a Mr. Baxter. ♪ ♪ WILKMAN:
Mulholland doesn't
get there until hours later. He stands in shock and awe and horror, looking at where the
St. Francis Dam once was. And all that's left is this
center section of the dam. Everything else from
the dam is gone. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Within days, tourists began showing up
at the disaster zone. Scaling the towering monolith
that became known as the Tombstone. Collecting bits
of debris for souvenirs. The sightseers fed a growing
bitterness among the survivors. ♪ ♪ COWAN:
The haves and have-nots
are very finely delineated during times of distress,
during times of disaster. It makes the inequalities
in a society very acute. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Searchers found bodies
of ranchers, housewives, teachers, farmhands, children. But some of the bodies
were lost forever. ALAMILLO:
We never know how many, exactly, died that night. It was a community that
had many transients. There were migrant workers
or migrant families. And so many of them, maybe,
who lived along the river, who got swept away, they will never be known. And the fact that
we can never name them or find out who they are still haunts us
even to this day. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
For supporters of Hoover Dam, the disaster couldn't
have come at a worse time. Just as the Senate
was about to decide the fate of the project,
Mulholland's catastrophe threatened to bring
down the whole enterprise. ROGERS:
The Hoover Dam was
the largest line-item expenditure in the history
of the United States. They had the votes to
finally get this thing. The problem was that
Mulholland was the biggest visible cheerleader
for that whole proposal. How can you be sure about
the safety of any other dam? They've got to find a way
to deal with this very quickly. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
On March 15, two days
after the disaster, California Governor C.C. Young appointed a commission to
investigate the dam's failure. Within a week, the commission
announced that the dam had collapsed because
of a deficiency in the soil under the west wing. It was a reassuring conclusion: the failure was an aberration, unlikely to be repeated. It's a rabbit trail. It's not what caused
the dam to fail. But nobody wants to
investigate it too much. NARRATOR:
Meanwhile, the city moved
quickly to settle with the survivors. WILKMAN:
The city agreed upon
a kind of a fixed price. $5,000 for a human
life is not enough. But that's what was negotiated. The city paid, very quickly. They wanted to get
it out of the way. NARRATOR:
But for Mulholland, the
reckoning was just beginning. Some of the victims had
died in Los Angeles County, so the county coroner
had to determine whether a crime had been committed. It's not a criminal trial. It was a trial to determine
who was responsible and to determine if they were
going to indict anybody. It's quite possible
that William Mulholland would've been
indicted for murder. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Eight days after the disaster, William Mulholland
took the stand at the Los Angeles
County Courthouse. To date, 277 bodies
had been found. Hundreds were still missing. Mulholland was at times
prickly and evasive under interrogation,
but he did, finally, get to the heart of the matter. "If there is any error
in human judgment," Mulholland admitted,
"I was the human. I won't try to fasten
it on anybody else." MONTOYA:
The fact that Mulholland takes responsibility for the
St. Francis Dam disaster allows people not to have to
ask really difficult questions. If blame could be put
on this individual, you just remove the individual. NARRATOR:
In November 1928,
a few weeks before the crucial Senate
vote on Hoover Dam, William Mulholland retired
from the Water Bureau. JACKSON:
It was time for
him to move along. And so long as he did,
then he was, well, he was given a pension. They hold a banquet for him. No mention is ever made
of the St. Francis Dam. NARRATOR:
In the spring of 1929,
the City of Los Angeles erased one of the last
vestiges of the disaster by obliterating
the dam's remains. (speaking inaudibly) But it wasn't so easy
to get rid of the very conspicuous reminder
of the St. Francis Dam, and of William Mulholland,
in the heart of Los Angeles. ROGERS:
Nobody trusted the Hollywood Dam after St. Francis Dam went out. They ended up drawing
it down two-thirds. It only holds one-third its
design capacity, and it had a huge
embankment fill added to the front of it. ST. JOHN:
The monument to the triumph of man over nature
and to William Mulholland gets buried in dirt. People in Hollywood no
longer have to be reminded that there is a huge dam
looming over their heads. WILKMAN:
Mulholland had a stroke and his health began
to deteriorate. At family gathering,
he would just sit in the corner
and just stare into space. NARRATOR:
William Mulholland
died in Los Angeles on July 22, 1935, two months before the
dedication of Hoover Dam. ♪ ♪ COWAN:
Heroes serve the purpose
of simplifying stories. Villains also
do something similar. And in this story,
Mulholland is the villain. There's lots of other
folks, including the populace of Los Angeles,
who voted for the project, who overwhelmingly supported it. This is a communal effort. (helicopter blades whirring) NARRATOR:
The St. Francis Dam
had largely disappeared from popular memory, but it left a deep impression
among the engineers who were designing the next
generation of public works. The Hoover Dam was to be the cornerstone
of a new West, and its creators were determined to banish
the ghost of St. Francis. I think a lot of good
things come out of failures. We pull back, we do things more carefully. St. Francis Dam had a
huge impact on Hoover Dam. NARRATOR:
Where the St. Francis Dam
had been largely one man's creation,
sketched out and then altered on the fly,
Hoover Dam was scrutinized by teams of experts
at every stage of its design
and construction. It captured the imagination as few public works ever have. Immense dams became
defining monuments of the age. ♪ ♪ BURKE:
The legacy of the
St. Francis Dam disaster was a very short-term moral, which is, "Build your
dams more carefully." I wish that they had taken a bigger moral from the story, which is, "Never trust anyone who tells you that
you can have it all." When they said, "Yeah, "even though it doesn't rain,
the sun is always shining, "we can feed the growing
city of L.A. and water our crops," all of them thought that
they could have it all. COWAN:
The idea that moving
water from one geography to another can be done
to such great effect, to say that's a disaster
might be counterintuitive. But in some ways, that allowed other regions
to do the same thing. It got us in the
situation we're in today. We can look at Mulholland Dam,
or St. Francis Dam, or Hoover Dam,
and we can think of those as engineering marvels. But also, all of these things have led us to an
unsustainable future. People are so optimistic
that technology will solve these environmental problems that sometimes we lose sight of other ways to solve problems. We're going to have to
learn to manage our resources, most particularly water. Where are we going
to get it from? What are we going to do with it? This story, and as
little known as it is, is a warning. And it couldn't be
more relevant to today. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER:
"American Experience:
Flood in the Desert" is available on DVD. To order, visit ShopPBS
or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS. "American Experience"
is also available with PBS Passport
and on Amazon Prime Video. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪
