First the Flood in Baldwin Hills, Now the Fire

The first alarm was sounded by a man named Revere--Revere G. Wells, caretaker of the dam. But for many victims of Baldwin Hills’ worst previous disaster, it came too late.

Shortly after Wells reported hearing water gurgling through a leak in the Baldwin Hills Reservoir on the morning of Dec. 14, 1963, evacuation warnings began. Police later said some residents either were too slow to leave or underestimated the danger.

Half the reservoir’s contents were safely drained in the next three hours, but then the structure split 75 feet, sending 292 million gallons of water into the neighborhood.

Christmas shoppers in a Fedco store at Rodeo Road and La Cienege Boulevard heard about the flood when television sets in one section began blaring bulletins.

“Everyone started running to their cars,” a shopper recalled. “The water was getting deeper fast. It was about two to four feet at the intersection and we saw debris, mud and wood. We pulled out and got away from there.” Police, fire and Coast Guard helicopters rescued more than 1,000 stranded people, some of them on rooftops in a section bounded by Hauser Boulevard, La Brea Avenue, Rodeo Road and the reservoir, two-thirds of mile south of Stocker Street.

5 People Drowned

Others were not so lucky. When the water stopped gushing 77 minutes later, five people had drowned and 201 houses and apartment buildings had been destroyed or heavily damaged.

It was a sad chapter in the history of the quiet section of the city, which had not received such publicity since 1932, when it served as the sight of the Olympic Village for 2,000 athletes in Los Angeles’ first Olympic Games.

Numerous lawsuits followed the dam disaster, but no final verdict was ever reached on what caused the rupture of the reservoir’s clay liner.

The city sued several oil companies, claiming that their drilling in the area had weakened the dam’s substructure over a period of several years.

Oil company engineers blamed the deluge on a shift of the Inglewood-Newport fault.

The lawsuit was finally settled out of court in 1970, with the city’s insurance companies paying $13 million in damage claims to residents and businesses, $4 million of which was repaid by the oil companies.

One of the landowners involved in the settlement was Baldwin M. Baldwin, grandson of the late E. J. (Lucky) Baldwin, the gold-mining pioneer for whom the dam and the area were named.

The dam was never refilled. Later, the area--west of the Tuesday’s fire site--was converted into Baldwin Hills Regional Park.