Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [65]
There are few earthly phenomena more awesome than a flood, and there is no flood more awesome than several years’ accumulation of rainfall released over the course of an hour or two. The initial surge of water was two hundred feet high, and could have toppled nearly anything in its path—thousand-ton blocks of concrete rode the crest like rafts. Seventy-five families were living in San Francisquito Canyon immediately below the dam. Only one of their members, who managed to claw his way up the canyon wall just before the first wave hit, survived. Ten miles below, the village of Castaic Junction stood where the narrow canyon opened into the broader and flatter Santa Clara Valley. When the surge engulfed the town, it was still seventy-eight feet high. Days later, bodies and bits of Castaic Junction showed up on the beaches near San Diego.
The flood exploded into the Santa Clara River, turned right, and swept through the valley toward the ocean. It tore across a construction camp where 170 men were sleeping, and carried off all but six. A few miles below, Southern California Edison was building a project and had erected a tent city for 140 men. At first, the night watchman thought it was an avalanche. As it dawned on him that the nearest snow was fifty miles away, the flood crest hit, forty feet high. The men who survived were those who didn’t have time to unzip their canvas tents, which were tight enough to float downstream like rafts. Eighty-four others died.
When the flood went through Piru, Fillmore, and Santa Paula it was semisolid, a battering ram congealed by homes, wagons, telephone poles, cars, and mud. Wooden bridges and buildings were instantaneously smashed to bits. A woman and her three children clung to a floating mattress until it snagged in the upper branches of a tree. They survived. A rancher who heard the deluge coming loaded his family in his truck and began to dash to safety. As he stopped by his neighbors’ house and ran to the door to warn them, the flood arrived and swept his family out to sea. A four-room house was dislodged and floated a mile downstream without a piece of furniture rearranged; when the dazed owners came to inspect it, they found their lamps still upright on their living-room tables. A brave driver trying to outrace the flood could not bring himself to pass the people waving desperately along the way; his car held fourteen corpses when it was hauled out of the mud. The flood went on, barely missing Saticoy and Montalvo, and, at five o’clock in the morning, went by Ventura and spent itself at sea.
Hundreds of people were dead, twelve hundred homes were demolished, and the topsoil from eight thousand acres of farmland was gone. William Mulholland, whose career lay amid the ruins, was still alive, but as he addressed the coroner’s inquest he bent his head and murmured, “I envy the dead.” After a feeble effort to put the blame on “dynamiters,” he took full responsibility for the disaster.
But the great city his aqueduct had created was, for the moment at least, willing to forgive him. “Chief Engineer Mulholland was a pitiable figure as he appeared before the Water and Power Commission yesterday,” the Los Angeles Times reported on March 16. “His figure was bowed, his face lined with worry and suffering.... Every commissioner had the deepest sympathy for the man who has spent his life for the service of the people of Los Angeles ... his Irish heart is kind, tender, and sympathetic.”
Nine separate investigations eventually probed the collapse of the Saint Francis Dam. No one is even sure how many lives were lost, but a likely total is around 450: it would become one of the dozen worst peacetime disasters in American history.