The Night the Dam Broke : Disasters: An engineer’s study redirects blame for the 1928 catastrophe that killed hundreds of Ventura County residents.

“The poor folks never had a beggar’s chance.” --A rescue worker who recovered bodies of victims.

In the chill, dead quiet of night on March 12, 1928, the 2-year-old St. Francis Dam stood in lonely grandeur--deep in a hardscrabble canyon 17 miles north of the Ventura County line.

It had been hailed as William Mulholland’s “impregnable” engineering masterpiece, a solitary keeper of 12 billion gallons of water reserved for Los Angeles residents. Ventura County civic leaders had long attacked the project, worrying that it would divert an important water source for farmers and residents in the Santa Clara Valley.

But at 11:57 p.m. that night, the cross-county argument became a tragic footnote in history.

The dam’s 200-foot-high concrete wall crumpled, unleashing all those billions of gallons down San Francisquito Canyon north of Saugus, leaving a staggering toll of 450 dead (and probably many more) in avalanches of water that swept 54 miles to the sea in Ventura. Half of the dead were Ventura County residents unlucky to be living in low-lying areas near Piru, Fillmore, Santa Paula and Ventura. Among disasters, it ranks with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which killed 452.

An investigative panel appointed by Gov. C. C. Young, reporting just 12 days after the collapse, hastily blamed Mulholland’s design, and the public outcry left the once-celebrated engineer a forlorn, broken man. One Ventura County woman, exhausted from efforts to shovel knee-deep mud from her house, hammered a sign into her front yard: “KILL MULHOLLAND.”

By the time he died seven years later at age 80, the horror of the St. Francis Dam would be all but tucked away in history’s graveyard.

Until now.

A Northern California geological engineer who investigates dam failures, J. David Rogers, has concluded that the dam collapsed because its eastern edge sat on an ancient landslide that he said plowed into it “like a bulldozer blade,” causing a chain reaction. Given the geological knowledge of the time, Mulholland and his designers were not aware of the fatal flaw--or able to recognize it in the investigation later.

Today, Rogers’ conclusions--after 15 years of painstaking, “almost obsessive” work, as one colleague put it--not only largely exonerate Mulholland but give perhaps California’s greatest single disaster a dramatic, revolutionary face lift.

“Oh, my God! That’s exciting!” blurted Doyce B. Nunis, a USC professor emeritus of history, upon learning of Rogers’ findings, which appear in a 30-page chapter of “Engineering Geology Practice in Southern California,” a book published Oct. 5 by the Assn. of Engineering Geologists’ Southern California Section.

“It revolutionizes the whole interpretation of that disaster,” said Nunis, who for 32 years has edited the quarterly journal of the Historical Society of Southern California.

It also renews interest in a disaster, which, oddly enough, is little known outside the Santa Clarita Valley and Ventura County, where the floodwaters swept past.

“It teaches all of us a good lesson,” said USC geology professor Bernard W. Pipkin, who, with Richard J. Proctor, former chief geologist of the Metropolitan Water District, co-edited the book that includes Rogers’ new theory.

“It tells us,” he said, “that we must always take fresh looks at old paradigms.”

Indeed, for years it was unchallenged that Mulholland was at fault. But if Rogers is right--and had investigators recognized the landslide--perhaps public opinion would have been kinder to Mulholland.

Instead, the father of Los Angeles’ municipal water system disconsolately accepted responsibility before retiring later that same year as chief engineer of the city’s Bureau of Water Works and Supply, a forerunner of the Department of Water and Power.

“Don’t blame anybody else; you just fasten it on me,” Mulholland said. “If there is an error of human judgment, I was the human.”

Mulholland, of course, was not the only one who failed to recognize danger signs that Rogers said are clearer now in the hindsight of history. There were signs, just hours before the flood, warning of the impending deluge.

“ Wastes Scarred by Fearful Hand of Death Stretch Under Leaden Skies in Land of Misery.”

--A Los Angeles Times headline--March 14, 1928 At dusk on March 12, Piru resident Bill Riley feared the worst.

He and his wife, Abigail, had brought their two small daughters to the dam for a day of sightseeing and he was frightened by what he saw. Water had seeped into the rocky, sand-like soil at the foot of the St. Francis Dam.

“This dam could go!” Riley told Abigail.

“Don’t be silly!” his wife said. “Those people wouldn’t have built a dam that weak.”

“I don’t care! Let’s get out of here!” Riley said, the family racing home so fast in their Ford pickup that Abigail Riley, now 93, recalls of her late husband: “Bill broke every speed limit. He kept saying, ‘Get out the candles! We won’t have any electricity tonight!’ ”

But to Abigail, his fears seemed preposterous. Four hours later, long after the Rileys had gone to sleep, the nightmare that Bill Riley had feared did happen--but far worse than imagined.

The mighty surge stripped the canyon bare of oak trees and brush, gushing into the farmlands below, demolishing 1,200 houses, washing out 10 bridges, knocking out power and paralyzing Castaic, Piru, Santa Paula and Fillmore with flooding. The city of Los Angeles would pay damage claims totaling at least $4.8 million.

The death toll of 450 may be hugely undercounted, said Nunis, the Southern California historian. “That count should be more like 600,” he said, “because so many bodies were washed into the ocean. And then, too, there were many migrant Mexican farm workers who were never accounted for.”

Lifelong Piru resident Harry H. Lechler recalls going down to the river with his father the morning of March 13, after the 60-foot-high wall of water had diminished. There the 17-year-old high school student watched men pull body after body out of the mud, stack them on wagons and transport them to a dance hall in Piru that had been set up as a temporary morgue.

“You could smell that mud real strong, just like when you get a first rain,” Lechler said.

Ironically, at midday on March 12, Mulholland and his chief assistant, Harvey Van Norman, had inspected the dam and pronounced it sound. They had been summoned by dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger, who told them that the dam was discharging “dirty” water.

Twelve hours later, Harnischfeger and his 6-year-old son were among the first to die when the dam finally burst.

And long after the collapse, Mulholland would be variously described as a patron saint of dam-building--this was his last of 19 dams and the only one that failed--and an “Irish bully.” Mulholland had choreographed construction of the Los Angeles-Owens River Aqueduct that, to this day, funnels water to Southern California from the Sierra Nevada, 300 miles to the north.

When the aqueduct first delivered water to the San Fernando Valley on Nov. 5, 1913, Mulholland stood proudly at dedication ceremonies, pointed to the flow of water and announced: “There it is! Take it!” The line became almost a trademark, quoted again and again.

In the 1970s, Mulholland’s fall intrigued a Cal Poly Pomona student named J. David Rogers as he read “Man-Made Disaster,” a 1963 book by a Santa Paula journalist, the late Charles Outland, who attempted to make sense of the tragedy.

Two Bureau of Power and Light employees who worked at Powerhouse No. 1, five miles above the dam, told Outland that they had driven the dirt canyon road alongside the dam in the darkness, a few hours before the collapse. They noticed that the road had “dropped at least 12 inches, just upstream of the dam’s east abutment.”

“When I read that, I came out of my seat,” Rogers said. “That tells you the abutment was beginning to drop and thrust against the back of the dam, causing the reservoir to tilt.”

Rogers said Outland’s book inspired him to pursue geological engineering and to explore the tragedy of the St. Francis Dam with a tenacity not unlike that of assassination buffs who challenge official conclusions about the deaths of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

The official report on the disaster said Mulholland had built the dam on a fault consisting of porous layers of rock resembling sandstone, concluding that the foundation could have absorbed water, causing it to weaken. Rogers thought otherwise, but it took those 15 years of work, using modern research techniques and previously unavailable material, to come up with his thesis.

The dam was built partly on a giant landslide, which started moving naturally--with no evidence of seismic activity--two to three hours before midnight March 12, Rogers said. A mass of 500,000 cubic yards of land slid so far that earth at the dam’s eastern abutment turned up at its west end, 800 feet away, and even as deep as 60 feet below the dam’s base.

“The mass of land that moved weighed 877,500 tons, more than three times the dam itself, which weighed 251,000 tons,” said Rogers, 38, who holds a doctorate in civil engineering and has taught at UC Berkeley. “That put an enormous amount of stress on the dam.”

In an interview, Rogers said almost no engineers of Mulholland’s generation understood the “uplift theory”--meaning, he said, that “dams aren’t as heavy as most people think.”

At the St. Francis Dam, Rogers said, the landslide’s powerful force propelled the concrete base upward. And what made the dam all the more vulnerable, he added, was the enormous buoyancy of those 12 billion gallons of water.

“Think of holding a cubic foot of soil weighing 100 pounds in your hands--and then jumping into a swimming pool with it,” Rogers said. “Suddenly, that same cubic foot weighs a lot less--only 37.6 pounds. That’s how the pieces of concrete--one weighing 1,600 tons--carried so far downstream.”

Indeed, today, the dam site is a stark, lonely hollow where a few chunks of the dam’s base lay scattered--like headstones in a giant graveyard.

So how can the official report’s conclusions be explained? After all, it said the break started on the west side of the dam, not the east. Politics, as well as unrefined geological techniques, may have played a role.

Outland wrote that he had difficulty getting observers to talk on the record, even long after many had retired from the Bureau of Water Works. In a newspaper interview years later, he theorized, too, that attempts to suppress serious examination of the tragedy began soon after it happened because 1928 also was the year an argument raged over whether to build the colossal Hoover Dam on the Colorado River.

“I think perhaps even the people in the devastated area were willing to stop talking about, if not forget, the St. Francis Dam,” Outland said in 1978, a decade before he died. “After all, the Hoover Dam was going to hold 700 times as much water, and they didn’t want opponents pointing to what happened at St. Francis.”

“She had lost her nightgown and had no clothes on when we found her, and she was so embarrassed that to this day she pretends she doesn’t recognize me .”

--A man who rescued a 12-year-old girl from a tree. The horror of the St. Francis Dam is also a story of survivors and those who remember. It also has spawned a small cadre of avid, long-term scholars, such as Don Ray, a free-lance investigative journalist and Burbank resident who has compiled oral-history interviews of many survivors.

Jerry Reynolds, curator of the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society, escorts 100 to 150 people to the site on anniversary field trips every March. Reynolds addresses the disaster in his forthcoming book about the area, “The Valley of the Golden Dream.”

Some participants of past field trips--the society’s most popular function--have included those who were there, like Abigail Riley.

Riley, the 93-year-old former Piru resident whose husband had feared the worst, recalled that she was awakened in the middle of the night by one of her daughters, who complained of a small pain. Riley said she went to the kitchen and pulled the light switch.

No light.

She flicked a light switch in another room.

Again, nothing.

“Ohhh, no!” she thought, recalling the family’s visit to the dam hours earlier. “The dam did go!”

She shook her husband awake and said, “Honey, I guess the dam went out!”

As Bill Riley groggily rubbed sleep from his eyes, someone knocked on the door.

“Bill! Quick! We need your help!” a neighbor shouted.

Abigail Riley recalled that not long after her husband rushed out that early morning, she had stood alone on the front porch. She heard a roar that sounded like a train a few miles away. It must be the flooding, she thought.

The mist she felt against her face, she said, presumably had risen from floodwaters she could hear but not see in the darkness. “It felt like a sudden rain,” she said.

Darrell Haskell also remembers that night. Haskell, 73, a fifth-generation Californian and retired engineering contractor, was only 9 when his 21-year-old brother, John, ran to the family’s home screaming, “The dam’s gone out! We’ve got to find Clara and Oscar!”

They would soon learn that Clara Willmont, Haskell’s aunt, died in the rampaging flood that swept away the Willmonts’ home in Castaic. Her husband, Oscar, survived but not for long, Haskell said, because he was overcome by the shock of losing his wife and two children in the disaster.

“We lost 42 of my schoolmates--half the enrollment at Saugus Elementary School,” Haskell recalled.

Peggy Willmont, 13, a cousin of Haskell, was the only other Willmont family survivor--clinging to huge shards of a telephone pole, riding out the floodwaters before she was reunited, miraculously, with her father miles away.

Haskell is skeptical of Rogers’ new theory on the disaster. Twenty-four hours after the collapse, Haskell said, he visited the site as a 9-year-old with his grandfather, an engineer.

“He said the problem with that dam was that it wasn’t anchored into bedrock, that it was anchored into shale,” Haskell said.

“So this other guy says there could have been a landslide? Well, we had good geologists back in those days, and they said nothing about a landslide. Where do you think today’s geologists learned what they know, for chrissakes?”

Harold Jasper Bookman was only 10 when the flood hit. His family lived in the hills above Fillmore, where his father worked on an oil field, and avoided any major damage. But Bookman vividly remembers whole families, ranchers and farmers, wiped out in their sleep that fateful night.

“They farmed right down to the river bottom because it was fertile soil for citrus,” said Bookman, now 74. “The water just inundated the whole area and they never had a chance.”