SCV Reader March 2016

12 • THE Reader
March 2016
loCal hiStory
The St. Francis Dam Disaster: 13 Things You Probably Don’t Know
by John Boston
Staff Writer
Quiet San Francisquito Canyon in
Saugus is infamous for being the site
of the 11th-worst manmade disaster
in American history. Just before midnight,
on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam
burst, sending a nearly 200-foot tidal wave of
water down the canyon. For 55 miles, the
flood carved a watery path of destruction all
the way to the Pacific Ocean and killed between
500-to-600 people.
This epic flood nearly bankrupted Newhall
Land & Farming Co. It devastated the thinly
populated Santa Clarita Valley, wiping out entire
families, destroying farms and casting a
pale of tragedy that would be felt for decades.
It turned a beautiful canyon, lined with great
trees, meadows, flowers and grassland into a
nightmarish landscape. Family members
noted the break probably crushed the soul of
its builder, William Mulholland, who had
green-lighted the dam’s soundness just 12
hours earlier.
Mulholland retired shortly after the disaster,
went into seclusion and died a few years
later, a broken man.
After the 1906 San Francisco fire, which
followed the epic earthquake, the St. Francis
Dam is the worst disaster in California history.
There are many stories about the dam,
ill-fated (the dam was built at the convergence
of three earthquake fault lines) even
before the first shovel of dirt was removed.
Here are 13 things you probably don’t know
about our valley’s forever-dark chapter in
American history…
13) The day of the break, dam keeper Tony
Harnischfeger had a home near the base of
The disaster is heartbreaking, when you put young
faces to it. Two of the first casualties were little girls
Marjorie and Mazie Curtis, and their father,
Lyman. The little boy, their 3-year-old brother
Danny, managed to survive, with his mother, Lillian.
PhoTo CoURTeSy oF SCV hiSToRiCAL SoCieTy.
the monolith and called Mulholland that the
dam was springing enormous leaks. The
DWP employee was also the dam’s first victim.
They found half his body several miles
downstream. About two years later, they
found the second (and lower) half of his body
with his wallet and ID intact..
12) Mulholland was fully exonerated in
Mulholland, without any tests, oversight, calculations or widening the base, added an additional 13-feet to the
height of the dam, making it 187-feet tall. Shortly after the disaster, the DWP blew up this monolith as a PR move.
PhoTo CoURTeSy oF SCV hiSToRiCAL SoCieTy.
1995 by geological engineer J. David Rogers
68 years later. Rogers published that Mulholland
didn’t have the technology to know
the dam was built on ancient fault cracks.
But, local newspaper reports noted that even
before construction, many locals warned
Mulholland the ground was unstable and
L.A.’s chief engineer ignored them.
11) Local mail carrier W.T. Stonecypher
also warned Mulholland. Months earlier, the
rural deliveryman noted that 500-feet of
road was drastically sinking (about four feet)
from the weight of the water and concrete.
Stonecypher refused to continue that portion
of his route and people had to come into
town for their mail.
10) Newhall’s Ed Adkins was in charge of
collecting corpses. He delivered hundreds of
dead bodies to various spots, including the
Hap-a-Land Hall (where the Courthouse
Building on Market St. is today). The hall was
the SCV’s social center, where they held most
big community parties, movies and dances.
After serving as a morgue, it was never used
as a social spot again. Adkins had the stomach
for his job. He had been in China during
the Boxer Rebellion and had witnessed hundreds
of beheadings.
9) Easily the most supernatural of all stories
involves famed movie star Harry Carey.
He had a huge ranch in the canyon and employed
about 100 Navajos to run it. A few
days before the dam burst, Carey was in New
York City, starring in a Broadway play. The
tribe’s medicine man called and reported he
had a nightmare of impending and epic disaster
and said he would be moving the entire
village back to Arizona. They left and avoided
certain death.
8) Southern California Edison set up a
work camp near Castaic by the Santa Clara
River. Camping out in tents, many of the men
drowned. But about one-third were saved
when their tents acted as air pockets. Survivors
were able to float to safety.
7) Author Charles Outland noted that the
City of Los Angeles settled all claims without
much question. But, if you were a person of
color, you received less money for your suffering
and loss than white victims. Outland
wrote “Man-Made Disasters” and was a boy
in Santa Paula when the dam burst.
6) One of the aspects of the disaster was
that it changed a beautiful, scenic canyon
with trees and meadows into a gutted valley.
Gone were most of the shrubbery, trees and
wildflowers and the topsoil to grow more.
5) Several local survivors planted signs
around the valley, reading: “Kill Mulholland.”
4) Lifetime resident Bailey Haskell was a
teen who rushed in the dark to help rescue
victims. As a shiveringly cold dawn broke, he
spotted a 12-year-old girl clutching to the
higher branches of an oak. The flood had
completed tore all her clothing away. Haskell
got a ladder, climbed the tree, threw a blanket
around her and carried her down to
safety. He noted she was so embarrassed that
for 50 years after, she never looked at him or
acknowledged her rescuer’s presence.
3) Superstar Wm. S. Hart was part of the
rescue. He found the body of a little boy,
about 6, near Piru and could never find the
family. Hart arranged for the child to be
buried in a cowboy outfit and be buried in
the Ruiz family cemetery in San Francisquito.
The unknown boy’s tombstone reads: “The
Littlest Wrangler.”
2) While it’s the Ruiz family cemetery, to
this day it’s called the Chinese Graveyard.
The SF Canyon resident Henry Ruiz would
later grow to manhood and ironically work
for the DWP. He lost eight members of his
family in the flood and never talk about that
night again.
1) When 12 billion gallons of floodwaters
reached the Pacific around dawn on March
13, Ventura fishermen reported a gruesome
sight — an apocalyptic shark feeding frenzy
on corpses — animal to human — washed
out to sea and floating on the surface. R
(Left) newhall’s dance hall and
community center, the hap-a-
Land hall, became a makeshift
morgue. Before sunrise, volunteers
were already setting up
slats to stack bodies. PhoTo CoUR-
TeSy oF SCV hiSToRiCAL SoCieTy.
(Below) This is the last
known photo of dam
keeper Tony harnischfeger.
he and his wife
divorced in 1927 and he
lived alone at the base of
the dam. PhoTo CoURTeSy oF
SCV hiSToRiCAL SoCieTy.