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Living Arts
Water’s Indelible Landscape:
The St. Francis Dam Disaster
by Michael Cervin
Landscapes assume many forms: peaceful undulating hills, jagged mountain scenarios, the benign oceans at twilight, the cold hardscape of cities. But landscapes can also be reflective spaces that serve as memorials, places of quiet respect for those who have died.
In 1928, near what would eventually become the amusement park, Magic Mountain, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, killing nearly 600 men, women and children. The path of destruction, which destroyed 11,000 acres of crops, was 54 miles long and extended to the ocean near Ventura. It is a landscape of tragedy, survival and heroism.
The story begins with a primal need. Los Angeles needed water to support its rapid growth as a major metropolitan center. The problem was that Southern California has always been a semi-arid environment, prone to dry spells two out of every three years.
In 1904 William Mulholland grasped the seriousness of the situation and realized that unless water could come to the City of Angels, there would be no future for the small pueblo. As the head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, he designed and built a 233-mile aqueduct from the Owens Valley, near the Sierra Nevada Mountains, to the San Fernando Valley. The termination point is currently where the 5 and 210 freeways meet near Sylmar.
Mulholland also devised a series of aqueducts, reservoirs and dams to operate as holding tanks. In 1924, construction began on the St. Francis Dam in the isolated San Francisquito Canyon in Santa Clarita. The concrete dam, 210 feet high and 500 feet long, held nearly 13 billion gallons of water. Two years after its completion, and within weeks of being completely filled, things went terribly wrong. At four minutes to midnight on March 13, 1928, the dam failed and a massive torrent of water burst forth, scarring the land and obliterating everything in its path. Though many perished, there were people who did everything in their power to warn those downstream of the impending doom. The telephone operator stayed at her post and called as many people as she could. Two motorcycle cops rode ahead of the water from Piru to Santa Paula to wake families out of their beds.
As I walk the flood path today, eight decades after the violent catastrophe, there’s a palpable sadness within me. Parts of the dam are still visible, though eroded and malformed. If you don’t know what to look for, you’ll walk right past it, assuming you’re strolling through a peaceful canyon. But if you know where to look, history is still underfoot. A small stream still flows through San Fransicquito Canyon and the smell of dogwood permeates the air. The stream lopes up, visible, and then disappears deep underground. The flood path, much of it on private property now, vacillates between dry, barren earth and soft sand. Parts of the flood path are so choked with trees, shrub and debris that I am forced to fight my way downstream, something the water never had to do. Random bits of concrete dam, rusticated iron and tangled pieces of old wire still pierce through the earth. Long after the failure, a road went directly through the heart of where the dam once stood. The road, now mostly washed away by heavy rains, was paved directly over the thirty feet of debris left near the foot of the dam, undoubtedly sealing the fate of people whose bodies were never found and secrets that will never give us an understanding of all that happened that fateful night.
Standing exactly where the dam once stood, it’s overwhelming, knowing how high the wall of water was. My jaw drops as I understand that the sheer force of the water would have necessitated the destruction of everything in its way. The initial surge of water was 180 feet high, forced through the narrow San Francisquito Canyon. Then it broke free and joined the Santa Clara River, moving swiftly towards the Pacific Ocean. If you drive Highway 126 you will follow almost the exact route the water took. When the water reached Santa Paula it was 25 feet high and loaded with rock, trees, dead livestock—anything and everything. Today urban developments and big box stores clog the landscape. If they had existed 80 years ago, housing developments with names like West Creek, Village Walk and Pacific Hills would have been wiped out. Wal-Mart, Starbucks and Del Taco would have been decimated, and parts of Magic Mountain would no longer exist.
If we forget the lessons of the past, and those who have died in the wake of a history they didn’t ask for, we will never evolve or change. There is a haunting truth to the remnants that are still visible, and the memory of so many innocent people who perished. There’s also a disturbing disregard for the landscape itself, which is covered with broken beer bottles, aluminum cans, old tires, cigarette butts and shotgun shells. Someone even left three Catholic themed candles on one piece of dam rubble. Was it to honor those who died, or just another discarded piece of someone’s life? The St. Francis tragedy reminds us that landscapes come in all forms—beautiful, ugly and necessary—all of which invite us to become better humans.