Disaster, Informed by Time

Minutes before midnight on the chilly evening of March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam failed.

The dam’s 200-foot-high concrete wall crumpled and collapsed, sending billions of gallons of raging flood waters down San Francisquito Canyon, about 5 miles northeast of what is now Magic Mountain. The avalanche of water swept 54 miles down the Santa Clara River Valley to the sea.

An exact death toll was never arrived at but more than 450 people perished in the disaster.

As a result of the dam’s failure, 1,200 homes were demolished, 10 bridges were washed out, power was knocked out over a wide area and the communities of Castaic, Piru, Fillmore and Santa Paula were paralyzed.

In addition to the reported deaths there were many bodies that were never found.

I have read all the newspaper accounts and books that I can get my hands on about this disaster. I have examined photographs with a magnifying glass, looking for details that only a snapshot can reveal. Survivors have told me their stories.

All this information bobbed around in my mind like the debris that was caught up by the flood waters.

Making sense of this history has resulted in the exhibit I curated at the Santa Paula Union Oil Museum. It’s called “Dam Break--Heroes and Survivors.” During most of my research it was raining. During the time we were installing the exhibit it was raining.

The moisture caused my paper exhibit labels to curl up on the wall and look unprofessional. Sandbags protecting the doors of the museum made access difficult. That pesky El Nino.

For the past few months I have been mentally immersed in the history of the St. Francis Dam disaster while being physically immersed in our present wet phenomenon. How could I not make comparisons?

We did not have a disaster in February in Ventura County. It may have been awful, gut-wrenching, deadly, costly and inconvenient, but it wasn’t a disaster. A disaster is an event that occurs suddenly. It is also often localized. El Nino has not been sudden and has not been localized.

I first heard of El Nino about 15 years ago from my father-in-law. He had just returned from the Galapagos Islands.

He had had a spectacular experience because of a phenomenon the locals called El Nino. It made plants grow and bloom with flowers that hadn’t been seen for years. He told me that El Nino comes in cycles and varies in intensity. I was warned.

I was warned about El Nino again last year. I had a long time to get prepared. I did nothing. There was no immediacy. There was no suddenness.

The gradual onset of El Nino reminds me of the science experiment with the frog in boiling water. A frog dropped into boiling water will jump right out. Wouldn’t you? A frog placed in cool water in a pot on a stove will just swim around. As the temperature rises to boiling the frog just keeps swimming around until it eventually dies. The frog only senses a disaster if it is suddenly hot.

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We only sense a disaster if we are suddenly hot, wet, blown or shaken. Gradual doesn’t make it.

What made the St. Francis Dam disaster seem so much more sudden was only our relative sense of time. How we measure time accounts for our definition of suddenness. To an exploding electron, the 5 1/2 hours that the 1928 flood took to get to the ocean was an eternity. Measured by stellar motion, the entire El Nino is less than a sneeze.

The flood water flowing down San Francisquito Canyon soon became loaded with debris. It became a debris flow with so much silt in it that dead bodies weighed more than when alive, due to the silt that clogged air passages.

The density of a debris flow is thicker than a flow of plain water. Because it is denser it acts differently. That dam break water became a giant snake of debris crawling at about 12 mph down the valley and eating everything in its path.

It was a moving accident.

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The morning after the dam break on March 13, 1928, there was a sun shining somewhere above the fog that hung over the Santa Clara River Valley. That sun was working up some atmospheric forces and heating up the ocean and causing a gentle rain somewhere. Eventually the heat from that sun in 1928 stimulated the weather cycle. One thing leads to another in love and life and here we are with El Nino for company.

I visualize El Nino as something like the debris flow of flood water. It has a life of its own and it eats things in its path.

What El Nino lacks in density it more than makes up for in intensity. If you shrank El Nino and condensed it in time and localized it in the Santa Clara River Valley you might have some idea of the intensity of what happened in the early hours of March 13, 1928.

The study of the past teaches compassion for those of us living in the present. “Dam Break--Heroes and Survivors” connected me with a disaster of our Ventura County past and softened my heart to the victims of our current storms.