|
A featured speaker at the May 7 symposium was Associate Dean/Professor Thomas McMullen of the University of Maryland whose “The St. Francis Dam Collapse and Its Impact on the Construction of the Hoover Dam” revealed some startling conclusions about the disaster. |
Part II: St. Francis Dam Disaster Symposium offers theories, characters
May 25, 2016
By Peggy Kelly
Santa Paula News
Theories about the St. Francis Dam Disaster as well as focus on a character familiar to Santa Paulans was highlighted by a panel including experts in their field at the May 7 symposium at the Ventura County Agriculture Museum.
Attendees also learned about curating historical photographs and heard from others involved in various studies of the disaster.
Sponsored by the California State University Northridge Forgotten Casualties Project, it was the first time the annual symposium was held in Santa Paula and drew about 100 people interested in the disaster that occurred March 12, 1928.
The St. Francis Dam Disaster occurred minutes before midnight when the dam catastrophically failed; the resulting flood of 12.4 billion gallons of water took the lives of at least 431 confirmed victims as the destruction barreled over 56 miles from the dam site to the Pacific Ocean, destroying all in its path.
The waters swept through what is now Santa Clarita and through the Santa Clara River Valley, destroying millions of dollars of property and decimated parts of the communities it struck.
The collapse of the St. Francis Dam is considered to be one of the worst American civil engineering disasters of the 20th Century and remains the second-greatest single loss of life in California history after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
The disaster marked the end of the career of William Mulholland, the acclaimed head of the City of Los Angeles’ Bureau of Water Works & Supply who had created the Aqueduct.
A featured speaker was Associate Dean/Professor Thomas McMullen of the University of Maryland whose “The St. Francis Dam Collapse and Its Impact on the Construction of the Hoover Dam” revealed some startling conclusions about the disaster.
McMullen told the audience that while researching Hoover Dam for his masters’ thesis he saw several references to the St. Francis Dam Disaster, which piqued his interest.
After studying the dam disaster McMullen said he came to the conclusion that the structure would eventually “fail one way or the other, but the concrete made it collapse catastrophically…”
What had begun as a sidetracking sparked by curiosity from the main portion of his planned paper, the building of Hoover Dam, slowly turned into a quest to find out as much as he could about the St. Francis, its construction, the collapse and the aftermath.
Mulholland, acclaimed for building the gravity driven Aqueduct that brought Owens Valley water to Los Angeles, had worked with concrete in that pipeline project, material that McMullen noted would not have been required to have the same strength as that used for a dam.
In fact McMullen noted that Mulholland was able to repair one section of the Aqueduct that had “imploded” and had many fine instincts for construction.
But it was the teamwork of Walter Young and Frank Crowe that created the Hoover Dam while Mulholland was his own team. And much like his ill-fated dam itself Mulholland had no redundancy, a feature of the much larger Hoover Dam. When finished the St. Francis held 12-plus billion gallons of water, the Hoover Dam holds 10 trillion gallons, about 750 times more.
The whole approach to building the Hoover Dam was more detailed including an aggregate grading and screening plant onsite, material that Mulholland all but ignored.
In addition, Mulholland twice added to the dam face to increase capacity from 30,000-acre-feet to 38,000-acre-feet without reinforcing the toe of the rising structure.
McMullen said much of the construction of the St. Francis was flawed including lifts, curing which if not done properly leads to heat contractions, hummocks (humps) and other factors as well as location.
“There were lots of problems with the cutoff walls,” of the dam, and McMullen noted it had take 25 years of study to decide on the location of Hoover Dam, which has 580 miles of piping running cold water to keep the concrete from becoming too hot, safeguards not taken by Mulholland.
The concrete used for the St. Francis, he noted, was bound to fail.
McMullen said the thrifty Mulholland took rocks from the nearby river and remains of the dam show some rock 8 inches long “mixed with tiny stones…the strength of the concrete has to be seriously questioned.”
Problems with the St. Francis started early…although dams leak when troublesome patterns started to appear on the face of the structure Mulholland ordered quick fixes such as using oakum on cracks and to seal around the 8-inch pipe on the west wall.
“Oakum is a sinuous material,” made of such material as rope mixed with tar.
Rather than a way of fixing the St. Francis McMullen said its use showed Mulholland “was a desperate man by trying to seal this dam,” with a method that could not possibly hold back the water.
The report ordered by the state in the wake of the disaster was done in a hurry with only 13 pages of actual dialogue, “An incredibly small report” that mentioned the concrete used in the St. Francis was found to be sound.
McMullen, when he visited the site and collected samples, found otherwise when he had the material blind tested by a testing laboratory and the deficiencies — although easy to see — were confirmed.
There was no uniformity in the concrete, which had gapping air pockets around the aggregate causing issues such as the leaking of the material itself from the dam.
The concrete, said McMullen “turned to mush, and it was predictable. I imagine Mulholland did know his dam was going to catastrophically fail,” and his only refuge was self-denial.
You can walk through the tunnels at the Hoover Dam, where piping “Is still cooling the dam today,” technology that had been used as far back as 1910 with the Olive Bridge Dam where other models of concrete use were also set.
Mulholland, said McMullen, “Was in charge, we can only surmise he had some reason,” to go ahead with the St. Francis although it was obviously flawed. “It was pretty incredible” it was built the way it was.
McMullen also bucked popular opinion that the eastside abutment failed first, opting instead for the west side wing dike as the beginning of the end.
Overall, Mulholland “took a lot of risk…he never could have built a safe dam there…it was the worst place in the world to build a dam, it was doomed from the beginning.”
This reporter (Peggy Kelly) presented “Thornton’s Wild Ride! The True, Untold & Unbelievable Story of the Hero of the St. Francis Dam Disaster” a short documentary based on her upcoming book on former Santa Paula Police Chief Thornton Edwards.
Kelly traced the life of Edwards, a silent film actor who became a police officer and following the disaster, Santa Paula’s second police chief. He held the job for a decade and was fired by three city councilmen, a termination that caused uproar in the community.
Edwards again became a character actor and was quite active in films until the early 1950s.
As initially proposed in the mid-1990s “The Warning Statue” by Eric Richards was supposed to be of Edwards alone to symbolize the heroes, survivors and dead of the disaster but accusations that Edwards had been fired in 1939 for racism were raised, changing the work to two anonymous motorcycle officers.
During the question and answer session following her presentation Kelly went off topic to address a question raised during McMullen’s address.
Kelly said that victim claims paperwork discovered by Ann Stoddard Stansell, a founding member of the Forgotten Casualties Project and author of Memorialization and Memory of St. Francis Dam Disaster of 1928, showed Mulholland must have had evidence his dam was less than safe.
The death claim filed by Leona Johnson’s estranged husband claimed he was still married to the woman who was then living with the dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger and his young son below the dam.
Called to the site of the dam at about noon the day the St. Francis collapsed, Mulholland reportedly told the nervous dam keeper the structure was sound and not to worry about it.
During an October 1928 interview to determine the matter, Tony’s friend Archie J. Eley, the former fire chief of Los Angeles, told investigators that Leona had called him about 6:30 p.m. on March 12. Leona told Eley that Tony was unable to go camping with him as he had orders to stay on the job as the dam was leaking “bad” and he had to report three times a day.
Kelly told the symposium audience she wondered at the timing of the call, as it is commonly believed that the dam keeper, his son and girlfriend were at the dam face inspecting the structure when disaster struck.
“Mulholland left at about noon, Leona called the former fire chief at about 6 p.m. and the dam collapsed at midnight,” timing that could have represented Harnischfeger’s first day orders for keeping a close eye on the dam.
Photographer and author John Nichols — who wrote “The St. Francis Dam Disaster” and amassed the disaster collection now owned by the Ventura County Museum — addressed digital storage/curation issues of historical photographs including those of the dam disaster.
“On March 12, 2015, 430 gigabytes of external hard drive failed,” said Nichols, only half joking about his “digital asset…my collecting history goes back to analog days!”
Nichols confessed he was unfamiliar with the Francis Dam Disaster until a woman gave him a photograph at his John Nichols Gallery.
“I got a BA from CSUN, grew up in California and lived in Santa Paula…but had never heard of it!”
Since that time Nichols has collected photographs and other memorabilia and has curated about four exhibits on the disaster.
In 1998 when the 70th anniversary occurred there were still survivors in the area (there are just a handful now) who helped Nichols accumulate a “huge collection of more than 750 photographs…the day after the disaster people started taking pictures” leading to efforts to organize and maintain the original content.
Nichols addressed quality, reprinting and original photos some that had information written on the back, and he noted that before the symposium started former schoolteacher Joe Torres showed him pages from an old scrapbook of disaster aftermath photos.
Nichols admitted he is downsizing and not collecting nearly as much although he has a fondness for animal snapshots that he has organized into an exhibit, has a Facebook page for and is crafting a program for teachers to use with students.
But with the St. Francis Dam Nichols said, “I learned disaster sells…and from this disaster came a whole new religion…The Dammies!”
Other symposium speakers included CSUN Professor Dr. James Snead, founder of the Forgotten Casualties Project (FCP), CSUN student Krystal Kissinger who spoke of her archeological fieldwork in San Francisquito Canyon, home to the dam where some workers from the Los Angeles Aqueduct worked and lived.
Ann Stoddard Stansell, a founding member of the Forgotten Casualties Project and author of Memorialization and Memory of St. Francis Dam Disaster of 1928, also presented at the May 7 symposium.
