Heroes and Survivors

Just before midnight on the chilly evening of March 12, 1928, the new St. Francis Dam collapsed, unleashing a monstrous wall of water that roared down the Santa Clara River Valley. At least 450 people died.

Santa Paula, Fillmore, Piru and Castaic reeled from the disaster, which took about as many lives as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire but captured far less attention.

That will change soon. On Sunday the Santa Paula Union Oil Museum opens its newest exhibit, “Dam Break: Heroes and Survivors, the 70th Anniversary of the St. Francis Dam Disaster.” A reception is scheduled at 2 p.m.

Not only are there maps, photographs and old newspaper clippings that spell out the events of that night, but visitors can also see a model of a bronze sculpture, which historians hope to erect in Santa Paula.

Called “The Warning,” the sculpture by Eric Richards of Santa Paula depicts two motorcycle officers who frantically raced through the streets of the city that night, sirens wailing, to warn sleeping residents that the wall of water was fast approaching. One of them was Thornton Edwards, nicknamed “Paul Revere,” who later became the city’s police chief.

The sculpture is one of several memorials the Santa Paula Historical Society wants to erect in the Santa Clara Valley in the next five years to give the disaster belated recognition.

“If we wait much longer, there won’t be any survivors and eyewitnesses,” said the historical society’s Mary Alice Henderson. As part of the museum’s exhibit, visitors can listen to tape-recorded accounts of 14 Santa Paula residents who were living there when it happened.

Ruth Teague, 7 at the time, lived in Santa Paula Canyon. Her father was then-city engineer Harry Reddick, who, she recalls, had visited the dam only two weeks before it burst. “At dinner he told my mother the dam would give, it was going to blow,” she remembers. He, as well as others, were troubled by seepage at the dam. “But they couldn’t get any officials interested.”

Later, when sirens screeched in the night, he knew immediately what had happened, she said. He jumped out of bed and drove his flat-bed truck into town, bringing back loads of flood victims still in their nightclothes. He settled them in the orchard on the family’s property. “My mother found every blanket she could,” Teague said.

Cobbler Jess Victoria, 5 at the time, remembers his family evacuating its home on Main Street, piling into the Model-T Ford, and heading for higher ground at a dairy in Aliso Canyon where other Mexican families were fleeing.

But the car stalled on 7th Street and the family waited anxiously for a mechanic to get it running again. When they arrived at the dairy, the owner greeted the crowd with a rifle until he realized what had happened.

But many of the victims didn’t flee because they didn’t believe the flood waters were coming, Victoria said. “It wasn’t raining.”

The dam had burst in San Francisquito Canyon, about five miles northeast of where Magic Mountain is now located. The museum exhibit, curated by John Nichols’ Sespe Group in Santa Paula, features a mural-like map along one entire wall showing the disaster’s route.

Billions of gallons of water raged 54 miles down the Santa Clara River Valley to the ocean in Oxnard. Along the course shown on the mural, Nichols has positioned photos of the destruction that wiped out 1,200 homes and 10 bridges.

The newspaper accounts of the dam break and the havoc that followed are filled with amazing stories of survival: people who clung naked to tree branches as the water rushed around them, families rescued from the roofs of floating homes, plucky survivors who rode out the wave of water on mattresses, and rescuers who tangled with a huge nest of rattlesnakes in the debris.

“Not everyone knew the dam was there,” Nichols said. “How do you convince people downstream to evacuate?”

The 2-year-old dam had been the latest engineering triumph of William Mulholland. It held 38,000 acre-feet of water for a growing Los Angeles. Why it crumbled and collapsed that night has been the subject of heated speculation and grist for books, including one by the late Charles Outland of Santa Paula.

“Part of the detective work about the controversy was that on the night it broke, Mulholland visited it, looking for problems with it,” Nichols said. In fact, a leak had been discovered that day.

Mulholland accepted blame for the dam break. But 64 years later, in 1992, a Northern California geological engineer, J. David Rogers, concluded the dam gave way because it sat on an ancient landslide--a fact Mulholland couldn’t have known, given geological knowledge at the time.

As part of the exhibit, Nichols plans to display a 3,500-pound concrete chunk of the dam’s remains. It was trucked in from San Francisquito Canyon, where there is little sign today of the horrific events 70 years ago.

The exhibit, running through April 26, also provides a glimpse into the turmoil that followed the tragedy--the outpouring of hatred toward Mulholland and the efforts to recover damage claims of $4.8 million from the city of Los Angeles.

But the human face of the disaster is more chilling, even today. Visitors will see the desk made from a piano that took a crazy ride in a house that floated away that night, finally coming to rest in an orchard. They’ll see the headstone rubbing of a family of six who perished. And they’ll see photos of the spot hardest hit--a tent camp of 150 Southern California Edison Co. workers near the Ventura County border. Trapped in their tents, 84 died in the frigid flood waters.

BE THERE

Exhibit--”Dam Break: Heroes and Survivors, the 70th Anniversary of the St. Francis Dam Disaster” opens Sunday at Santa Paula Union Oil Museum, 1001 E. Main St. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday. Free. For information, call (805) 933-0076.