The Massive LA Disaster You've Never Heard Of

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Very excited for this one. The St. Francis Dam disaster is one of my favourite bits of LA history and this is a great analysis of it.

👍︎︎ 8 👤︎︎ u/LolaBleu 📅︎︎ Sep 26 2020 🗫︎ replies
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(dramatic music) - You can really sense what it would be like to just be right in the flood path. 12.5 billion gallons of water headed this way, like a serial killer and nobody could warn them of what was about to happen. Oh yeah, the dam's fine. There's no water coming through, it's gonna be great. (dramatic music) "Chinatown", a movie I hadn't seen but I knew it was all- - Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown. - For years I assumed that this classic film was about, oh, I don't know Chinatown. Only recently did I find out that the movie, directed by longtime fugitive from justice, Roman Polanski is actually loosely based on a true story of water rights and land usage in 1930s, Los Angeles. And I was like, that seems a little boring. To be honest, I live in LA and I don't really care about that but here's the thing. Early 20th century water disputes are actually interesting and hopelessly tragic, especially a story you've probably never heard, the failure of the Saint Francis Dam. Now the worst disaster in California history was in 1906, the San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fire. Over 3000 people died. But the second worst disaster and the largest manmade disaster was the all but forgotten failure of the Saint Francis Dam. It's estimated it killed 600 people but so many were immigrants and workers, we'll never really know the true death toll. By numbers, the dam failure is still one of the worst disasters in US history period, eclipsed only by modern events like 9/11. "Chinatown", the movie has sordid affairs and shootouts and all kinds of malfeasance. But the true story of bringing water to Los Angeles was so much worse. The Saint Francis Dam was completed on May 4th, 1926. It would stand for less than two years. Dean Keagy was driving his car to Powerhouse One where he worked as a warehouseman. As he glanced at the great white dam, practically glowing in the dark, he saw a few stray lights at the base of the dam on the canyon floor. Was that dam keeper, Tony Harnischfeger, and his son Coder. Did they see something? No one else would ever see? Did they know something nobody else knew? Just that morning Tony, the dam keeper had alerted the chief engineer, William Mulholland and his deputy, Harvey van Norman, that the west abutment of the dam was leaking muddy water, a sign that the foundation of the dam was failing. Around 10:30 AM, Mulholland and Van Norman drove out to the dam, said that the water was running clear and that everything was safe. Reports would later say that Tony was scared. A couple of days earlier on March 10th, an acquaintance of Tony said, Tony mentioned he had been reprimanded for talking in the manner I have and that if he continued to do so, he might lose his job. If it was Tony and his son at the base of the dam, just before midnight, he had only minutes before his worst fears were realized. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's talk water. By the early 20th century, it became abundantly clear that the city of Los Angeles needed water. After the Mexican American War, Los Angeles in the 1850s and '60 was a violent and forlorn backwater town but that reputation wouldn't last. And by the time the transcontinental railroad rolled into town in 1876, it was a sunny destination for health seekers and settlers alike. A visitor to Los Angeles in the 1860s when there was only a few thousand inhabitants, if you can believe that said, all that is wanted to naturally make it a paradise is water, more water, he probably didn't have that voice but maybe he did. By the late 19th century, the need for water could no longer be avoided despite the decimation of the Los Angeles river and the other limited water supplies, the men who made Los Angeles refuse to slow the population boom that LA was undergoing. New sources of water had to be found if the city was to survive. So Los Angeles put its trust in a man named William Mulholland. Mulholland was an Irish immigrant and in many ways, the embodiment of the American dream. Mulholland was a self-taught engineer, nicknamed The Chief. And he quickly impressed his bosses and moved up to superintendent by age 31. His goal was to find a water source that would give LA and the San Fernando Valley, more water than they could ask for. Much more water than they asked for, that's foreshadowing if it was not clear to the viewer. Mulholland led this search along with his friend, former mentor and one time LA mayor, Fred Eaton. They turned their attention to the Owens Valley 224 miles away. The Owens river flowed into the valley and provided water and irrigation for hundreds of ranches in the area. Here's how this happens. Eaton rolls into town under the guise of being a fellow rancher, just a good old boy rancher, here to do some ranching. So he's basically doing a, how do you do fellow kids to the Owens Valley? He starts buying up land and water rights for far less than the land was worth. The farmers and ranchers believed their land isn't worth much at all when in fact it's extremely valuable because all the water is about to be taken away to Los Angeles. Once this is discovered, an Owens Valley newspaper headline read, Los Angeles plots destruction, would take Owens River, lay lands waste ruin people, homes and communities. They were not happy. And it began what was thought of as California's Little Civil War but Mulholland is happy as can be. He had his water source and by November of 1913, he completed his aqueduct. Thousands of Angelenos attended the inaugural flow of water into the Valley. On the unveiling of his greatest achievement, one of the greatest engineering achievements in modern American history at the time, Mulholland said, only water was needed to make of this region a tremendously rich and productive empire. And now we have it. Is that Scottish? But the glory of the aqueduct would be short lived. You know those folks back in the Owens Valley, well, they started blowing up parts of the aqueduct with dynamite. In their defense there once fertile land was depleted. And when they did try to divert water for their own use, they faced legal action from Los Angeles. These bombings would continue happening for years and we'll come back in this story later. So now that Mulholland has stolen the water, it's time to store the water, enter the Saint Francis Dam built in the San Francisquito Canyon in Santa Clarita, 47 miles North of downtown Los Angeles. The project kept getting bigger in scope, ending up at a height of 195 feet. And the ability to hold 12.4 billion gallons of water in the reservoir. That was 25% bigger than the original design. In a gravity dam, like the Saint Francis dam was the width of the base is what stops the dam from tipping over. But despite the big increase to the dam's height, no change was made to its base. Mulholland though was still confident that it was a safe dam. In Powerhouse One, Ray Silvey was working the night shift. He laughed over the phone with electrician, Lou Burns over at Powerhouse Two in San Francisquito Canyon, below the dam. At 11:57 PM there was a blip on Powerhouse One's control board but at 12:02 AM, everything went black. (sloshing water) At 12:02 AM, when billions of gallons of water burst forth from the Saint Francis Dam, it didn't just decimate William Mulholland's legacy. It's swept up and spat out many hundreds of people in all the towns along the flood path. Makeshift morgues popped up everywhere with survivors crowding around them to look for loved ones. American Legion headquarters, general stores, feed stores and even dance halls were converted into morgues. One poolroom slash dance hall in New Hall was so quote, hastily repurposed as a morgue that they didn't have time to take down decorations from a recent party. And the dead were greeted with a cheery sign that read, welcome. Let's take this backwards from where the flood ended to where it all started. That was some light breaking and entering which we may do quite a lot of today. Where I'm standing right now on the beach between Oxnard and Ventura is where the flood finally hit the Pacific ocean at 5:30 AM. By the time it got here, it had gone 54 miles over five and a half hours and was miles long. Today this looks like a beautiful California beach but imagine it on the morning after the flood with debris trees, trash, gnarled structures and bodies, both animal and human. One of the saddest parts is we'll never really know how many people died. There are estimates ranging from 400 to 600 people but so many of those were undocumented Mexican workers and who knows how many were swept out to sea? There was one man whose body was found down on the Oxnard shoreline, who originally was picked up by the flood a full 65 miles away. There were bodies found as far as San Diego, some even say the Mexican border. The largest city along the flood path in the Santa Clara River Valley was Santa Paula with a population of over 7,000 people. Santa Paula was a mining and oil town but quickly became a citrus town starting with oranges and then moving to lemons. At one point, the Limoneira Company which is still here today, had the largest acreage of lemon orchards in the world and were cold citrus barons. Not surprisingly they used foreign labor to pick their fruits, starting with Chinese labor, moving to Japanese labor. And then because of racist, exclusionary immigration laws to Mexican labor. Santa Paula in the 1920s years was an incredibly racially divided town. They had quote, a proud chapter of the KKK. The Limoneira Company provided the Mexican laborers places to live here among the orchards and near packing plants. But these were bare bones houses with no indoor plumbing or electricity. The locals called it Spanish Town. Santa Paula had no protection from a hills or other natural barriers when the flood hit at 3:05 AM. Some were able to look for safety at higher ground but not everybody in Santa Paula got word of the oncoming water. The Mexican laborers living here in the orchards were doubly in danger because one, they were smack in the middle of the flood path and two, they didn't have any electricity or telephone so nobody could warn them of what was about to happen. Very few people in the Santa Clara River Valley had telephones in 1928. Nonetheless telephones played an important role when the Saint Francis Dam flood broke. Some of the heroes of the Saint Francis Dam disaster, where the so-called Hello Girls, phone operators in the towns along the flood path, who stayed at their switchboards, furiously calling as many people as they could to warn of the water barreling down upon them. In some cases, this warning came with only minutes to spare but those minutes were the difference between life and death. If it hadn't been for the Hello Girls, hundreds more would have died. Even with all the heroes and helpers that emerged that night, stories about who did and who did not survive, reveal a place in time that was stubbornly divided by race. There's the story of Thelma Macaulay. The 13-year-old girl suffering from measles, really a bad month for her all around. Who, when she felt her house lift upwards in the water, scrambled to get her mother, father and 17-year-old brother out of the house. And she'd escaped out the back door. After being carried for nine miles by the water, Thelma found herself stuck in the branches of a tree. She succumbed to exhaustion and woke up later in the Santa Paula Red Cross station for survivors. A woman came over and started bathing her. Upon washing the silts and debris off of Thelma, the woman exclaimed, oh why you're a white girl. And immediately had her transferred across the street, into her own home for further care. Even in the aftermath of a tragedy, the makeshift hospitals and morgues were segregated. Luckily where the American Red Cross fell short, LA Cruz Azula Mexicana stepped in run primarily by Mexican women and the Mexican consulate. They translated for Spanish speaking flood victims but even with the translators, officials largely wouldn't interview Mexican survivors, deeming them unfit to give their account. To this day, we still don't know many of their stories. This is Piru cemetery which you may recognize from our Green Death Revolution video. Anything for that forever corpse. I didn't remember that at all until we showed up here today and I was like, oh, I know you. The tiny town of Piru was one of the first towns to be hit by the flood. Piru did have a hill for protection but the people closest to the river did not have time to escape the waters. The flood hit the train tracks between Castaic and Piru so hard that they were ripped from the ground and twisted. In other places, the rails were lifted up and just dropped onto totally different roadways. But more than train tracks were destroyed in Piru. You can't really go to a cemetery in this area or along the flood path without finding a memorial to the Saint Francis Dam victims or even more often entire families buried in the cemetery. This is the Gottardi family, they were Italian immigrants. Joe and his wife Francis and their six small children. Francis the wife and five of the children died in the flood. There's this image of Joe, the father wandering his ruined orchard, crying, searching for his family. Not yet aware that basically all of them have been swept away by the flood. The body of one of his daughters, Lenore was never found. Joe, the father did actually end up buried here as well when he died in 1962. This is still a lot of heavy information. Oh good, the chicken is here for a much needed lightening of the mood. Are you floating through the night on a mattress with only a chicken for company? Getting bored at his lack of conversation? A big thanks to Audible for sponsoring this video and helping to fill the void. You can go to www.audible.com/mortician or text mortician to 500, 500 to get one audio book unlimited monthly Audible, original downloads and a 30-day trial, all absolutely free. But what's this about a chicken? Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Pearl Barnard was swept out of her house by the Saint Francis Dam flood only to find herself riding the floodwaters all night long, clinging to a mattress with only a small chicken for company. Both Pearl and the chicken survived. If you wanna learn even more about Pearl, her trusty chicken and the hundreds of other tales of survival, water politics and tragedy, we suggest John Wilkman's "Floodpath", listening to this audio book and driving through the Santa Clara River Valley was like going back in time to the foundations of Los Angeles. The URL and SMS code for the offer are in the description below. As usual, any audio book you get from Audible is yours forever and you can go back and relisten at any time even if you cancel your membership. Drive the flood path and take that California adventure deathlings. Of course I'm not advocating for unsafe travel. So maybe just grab your closest chicken, hunker down on a mattress in the safety of your own home and pop in your Air Pods. Thanks to Audible we're able to make a contribution to the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation to aid in recovery from the derecho storms that tore across Iowa and the Midwest. More on that at the end of this video. Unfortunately this is exit chicken stage left. Castaic junction, where we are now, imagine back to what it was like at the time, just fields of alfalfa and sheep. Now it's mostly known for Six Flags. (upbeat music) The flood hit the town of Castaic around 1:00 AM and all but washed it away with waves between 55 and 75 feet high. After the waters passed through Castaic, the town was quote, swept as bare as a pool table. These concrete structures that I'm standing on formed the base of an automobile bridge that spanned the Santa Clara River and was swept away in the flood that morning. You can really sense what it would be like to just be right in the flood path right here at the point that it's dozens and dozens of feet high. At the time, it was also a popular travel route with a well known cafe, gas station and cabins where people could stay. A father and son, the McIntyres see in the distance, lights flashing and some rumbling and their thinking, is there a storm coming, what's happening? And then all of a sudden out of some evil Fantasia-fantasy, the cabins lift up and start moving toward them. The McIntyres are able to grab on to a utility pole and hold on for dear life. But at this point, the flood has barbed wire and structures and dead animals in it and its points is 60 feet high. The father loses his grip on the pole and is ripped away to his death. As recently as the '90s, they were still finding remnants and remains from the flood in this area. We're getting closer and closer to where it all started. Powerhouse Two here behind me, was not the original Powerhouse Two. The first was one of the first structural victims of the flood. A 140-foot wall of water came roaring down at just after midnight, ripping away the steel and concrete structure. You have to remember that dams didn't just hold water. They also created electricity. So all of these power workers moved up here with their families and created a community, including homes, a social club, a church. A 126 of the 129 people that lived up here, died that morning. By 12:15 AM Powerhouse Two, about a mile and a half down from the dam was gone, wiped away entirely. Remember Ray Silvey at Powerhouse One laughing with his pal, Lou Burns the electrician down at Powerhouse Two? Silvey never did speak to his friend again. In the aftermath of the flood, Burns' body was recovered. His torso first and then his legs months later and miles away. Those who lived near Powerhouse Two, near the base of the dam, remember hearing what sounded like a thunder storm and feeling mist in the air. The precious few, who were able to scramble up hillside to safety, turned around to see just empty blackness where their homes once were. Finally we've reached the place where it all began. The site of the Saint Francis Dam. I think the part is gonna be, is that it? I think that's it. Wow, this is so much more dam than I thought was gonna be here. That's incredible, okay so these are the remains of the eastern and center part of the dam. And then up on top of this hill is the west wing dike which is still relatively intact. So if you can imagine all of this right here where we're standing was the dam and then everything in this direction, this huge reservoir was filled with 12.5 billion gallons of water. All of which drained out within an hour. Every picture that you see of the Saint Francis Dam, you see that iconic step ladder step structure down the front and this is it. These are the remains of those steps coming out like teeth out of the earth. And somehow, visually this is the most real thing to me about the ruins. It's visually recognizable as the dam. When the dam burst, huge pieces of it shot out and rolled about a quarter to a half a mile downstream. Forensic investigators used all the different pieces, like pieces of a puzzle, putting them together to solve the crime. In the aftermath, the immediate focus was on what caused such a massive failure? Later the city would try to suggest that it was those vengeful Owens Valley bombers who just blew up the dam. But history has come down on the idea that the main culprits were as they so often are oversight and hubris. Throughout its brief existence, the Saint Francis Dam was plagued by cracks that were regularly filled. The cracks didn't really bother Mulholland and most dams will have some cracks. But the cracks continue to appear in the foundation, the abutments and the wing dike, indicating that the dam wasn't as structurally sound as Mulholland insisted it was. And remember Tony, the dam keeper who was concerned about muddy water seeping out on the western side, where the dam met the canyon? That indicated that the very foundation of the dam itself was slowly getting washed away. Geological engineer, J. David Rogers believes that a landslide triggered the dam's failure, tearing up the foundation of the dam and making it lean and then opening up all those cracks. And those thousand ton chunks of dam that I showed you, blasted throughout San Francisquito Canyon. The water forced its way into an and under the structure and entire chunks of the dam became buoyant, essentially getting lifted and launched out into the canyon. The general consensus is that if Mulholland had known more about concrete dams and taking the time to learn more about the geology of San Francisquito Canyon, he may have built a better dam. To his credit, Mulholland took full responsibility for the failure of the dam and admitted that we must have overlooked something. And it did lead to better regulations like the California's Dam Safety Act and the Civil Engineers Registration Act in 1929 which don't sound that impressive but they're bureaucratic, they're good. I'm imagining Mulholland and Van Norman coming here on the morning of March 12th and going, oh yeah, the dam's fine. There's no water coming through. It's gonna be great. And then having to come back here the very next morning and the dam is just gone. Reports say that on that morning, Mulholland was looking old and shaky. And that's probably because he was starting to realize that it wasn't going to be a rescue mission but more of a body recovery situation. Mulholland started getting death threats at his house. And along the flood path, there was a town with a sign that said, hang Mulholland. I don't think I should feel sorry for him. But on the other hand, it would be hard to unwittingly kill several hundred people and then have all of your colleagues and your friends knit pick apart everything that you had done wrong. After the flood, what remained at the dam site itself right there where I was sitting was the tombstone, a massive central piece of the dam. It quickly became a morbid tourist attraction with people coming from all over the country to see it and photograph it. Cars lined the road into the canyon. Then an 18-year-old boy did what 18-year-old boys seemed to do and scaled up the tombstone got spooked, fell off and died at a nearby hospital. The dam had claimed yet another victim. The city decided to dynamite the tombstone. So no one else would be hurt. And because they were embarrassed to have it sitting there as a symbol of their failure. It's the end of a very long day. But we wanted to reach this step-stone piece that looks perhaps most like the original dam. Here in the canyon, the rescue workers would look for vultures because vultures would be an indication of where the dead bodies were. As you can imagine, recovering bodies and human remains after the flood was a gargantuan task. The search, went around the clock with the bodies and pieces of bodies being found in every state imaginable. While many people did in fact drown, most it seemed were killed some sort of blow or trauma while being slammed about in the flood. One brigade found just the fingers of a man sticking out of the sand. When they dug him out, they found that he died standing straight up, entirely buried in silt. Brigades of volunteers set out with shovels along the flood path, looking for bodies. Boy Scouts planted white flags where they found the dead. Mexican American laborers from all over Southern California joined the search efforts while authorities struggle to stay ahead of corpse robbers. Along the flood path, pyres were set of flame in attempt to rid the area of animal carcasses and debris. However, some human remains may have been accidentally burned in haste, making the number of deaths that much harder to confirm. Body gatherers with stretchers and sheets followed the white flags set by the Boy Scouts. The bodies they recovered would then be loaded onto mule carts to be pulled through the mud and debris to solid ground where a car or motorcycle would carry them to a morgue. When corpses were found, they were quickly photographed, identified if possible. And then given to the next of kin. While the city of Los Angeles tried to ensure that every person received a proper burial in a cemetery, many unclaimed dead were buried in communal graves at Ivy Lawn Memorial Park in Ventura and others approximately 20 were buried at the cemetery in Santa Paula. To this day, remains of Saint Francis Dam flood victims are still being found along the flood path. One of the big mysteries is that the damn keeper's fiance's body was found but the dam keeper himself, Tony and his son, Coder their bodies were never found. Are they still buried here somewhere in the canyon? Or were they blown out and crushed never to be seen again like so many others? 600 deaths, possibly many more. If there's any lesson here, it's a lesson about our obsession with progress. Why does a city need more resources? No matter what it does to the rest of the state. When progress for the sake of progress is fetishist, it becomes an end in and of itself. Even if there's no real progression in the health, wealth or wellbeing of the people. The city did pay the victims of the flood for their obsession with progress and their carelessness in causing the deaths. In the end, the city of Los Angeles rapidly paid out $14 million in the hope that the public would forget the disaster as soon as possible. And you could argue it worked. I've lived in LA for 12 years and had never heard about the Saint Francis Dam disaster. But now I have and now you have. Thank you again to Audible for sponsoring this video. Thanks to your sponsorship, we were able to donate to the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation. Put the chicken away for this. On August 10th, a devastating storm called a derecho, ripped through Iowa in the Midwest where my family's from. If you haven't heard about it, the "Iowa Starting Line" said, there are simply no words, photos or videos sufficient to describe the full extent of the carnage. Through their disaster recovery fund, the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation aims to help vulnerable populations that have been disproportionately impacted, particularly the needs of those not being met by existing nonprofit, local, state and federal programs. You can support us by going to audible.com/floating chicken, just kidding, audible.com/mortician or texting mortician to 500, 500. You can learn more about the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation below. This video was made with generous donations from death enthusiasts, just like you. I know my bangs are not perfect, 'cause it's so hot. They're just glued to my head. We're gonna see what we can do here. Chinatown, the site of the Saint Francis Dam. The largest city along the flood path in Santa Clara River, the largest city along the flood path in the Santa Clara. (mumbling) The largest city in the Saint Francis Dam. Keep them moving early bird. For years, the cemetery was maintained by a local motorcycle club, The Mischief Makers. Hi Kaitlin, tell us more. Oh, I'd love to tell you more. Another fun fact Rod Stewart's hot legs was shot in historic Piru and now we have it and now we have it and now we have it. Oh, good the chicken is here for a much needed. Okay, actually I have to go get the chicken. The chicken is not here unfortunately. What's the chickens best angle. He can take it, be honest with the chicken, okay. Kaitlin, is that an ask-a-mortician mug you're drinking from? It sure is, I wasn't intending to do a little promo for it but we have a new merge store. I'll put a link in the description. It's T-shirts, it's note books, it's pouches. It's little mugs. Unfortunately this is the end of the chicken's time on screen which was the end of my time on screen. I go sit in the air conditioner. They gave him some money. Great, I don't think we need to do too much apologizing for the state of California and the city of Los Angeles to be, oh, now I'm just getting grouchy. Who's getting grouchy? It's me, right? Are we done, chicken? Say we're done. Oh praise to the chicken. I just pour water all over myself from my ask-a-mortician mug. (bright music) (cackling chicken)
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Channel: Ask a Mortician
Views: 2,833,683
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: St. Francis Dam, Los Angeles, California, water wars, Santa Clarita, Santa Clara River, St. Francis Dam Flood, Santa Paula, Castaic, flood death, flood, Chinatown movie, flood victims, Caitlin Doughty, Ask a Mortician
Id: r8OSHlGfoL8
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 32min 45sec (1965 seconds)
Published: Sat Sep 26 2020
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