A Bright and Guilty Place Read online

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  Dam Disaster

  In 1928 the boom ran full tilt and the leaks in L.A.’s destiny had yet to appear. Nobody guessed yet that depression and a haunted future were around the corner, waiting to wash bright hope away. Leslie White was living in Ventura, about fifty miles north of the city. He was in his mid-twenties, recently married, and had his own photography business. Murder, and indeed Los Angeles itself, were far from his mind.

  Ventura had a population of fewer than 15,000. It had a Main Street, a courthouse, one of the original Spanish missions, and two small newspapers. On an average afternoon, its air was thick with the smell of citrus. But this country town was being transformed by oil fields that had been discovered nearby. Several of these gushers had been brought in by Ralph Lloyd in partnership with Joseph Dabney, the former a friend of Raymond Chandler’s and the latter who happened to be his boss in 1928. The existence of these Ventura fields, and a dispute concerning revenues from them, would be of great and surprising significance for Chandler’s career as a writer. But that was in the future.

  Leslie White came to Ventura in 1922. Born on May 12, 1903, he’d been raised in Canada—in Ottawa, Ontario. His father died when he was seven years old; his mother and aunts, strict Methodists, took the young boy to church three times a week, doing their best to point him in the ways of the Lord. He left school at fifteen, prone to ill health, and with an earnest and highly moral worldview. In Northern Canada he worked in a lumber mill and as a railroad fireman. He claimed, too, that he’d tried his hand as a prizefighter and traveled with a carnival. Certainly he loved adventure, and all his life he would be restless, searching for the next interest. On arrival in Ventura he secured a job as a park ranger, saying he knew how to ride though he’d never been on a horse. Mounting for the first time, he slipped and fell, breaking a collar bone. After he recovered, he went back to work, protecting land that had been bought for rich hunters. He became a deputy sheriff, despite admitting that what he knew of the law was “gleaned from Conan Doyle and motion pictures.” His superiors called him “The Kid.” He was touchy about his physique and youth, and he had a firecracker temper. Once he arrested a man for having carnal relations with a cow. On the lonely fog-swept promontory of Point Magu, he watched rumrunners armed with machine-guns bringing their crates of bootleg booze ashore. Gung ho, he was about to steam in to make some arrests when his superior warned him off, pointing out that the trucks into which the rumrunners were loading their stuff were driven and guarded by cops from the LAPD. This early brush acquainted White with how things worked in the big bad city where, as he would later write, “brains and money, or, better still, a combination of both, could sabotage the machinery of justice at will.”

  White shifted jobs frequently. The 1926 Ventura County directory lists him as a driver for Shell Oil and has him living on Poli Street, close to the courthouse. By 1928, however, he was married to Thelma, his first wife, and had opened the Leslie White Studio on Main Street. He loved gadgets and machines and had transformed himself into a photographer. He made portraits, or pictures of weddings and christenings, and did fingerprint and identification work for Ventura’s newly inaugurated police force. His business did well. A wall-sized blowup of one of his street scenes is still featured in the main Ventura library. He was also learning to fly and was a fan of Clara Bow, whose film Red Hair finally reached Ventura in March 1928. White was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club, and the Breakfast Club (at one meeting of which he caused a rumpus by releasing, as a prank, a tame circus lion!).

  Leslie White was a success, and if truth be told, more than a little bored; but that was about to change.

  At three minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, in Los Angeles County, near the Ventura County line, an abutment to the St. Francis Dam gave way. Twelve billion gallons of retained water stirred into life. At that moment a motorcyclist happened to be riding along the road at the reservoir’s edge; he said the area of water, covering 38,000 acres and more than three and a half miles, appeared to grow still and shiver.

  The water began to move, ripping through first one side of the dam and then the other, leaving only the dam’s central section, a 200-foot-high hunk of concrete that lurched forward but nonetheless was left standing like an ugly tooth. On either side, a liquid avalanche was released, shaking the walls of the San Francisquito Canyon with a noise that was “a monster in the night, roaring like a tornado.” Seventy families, mostly Mexican fruit pickers, lived immediately below the dam. They stood no chance.

  Fifty miles to the south, the lights of Los Angeles flickered. For a few seconds, the entire city fell into darkness.

  A power station lay a mile and a half from the foot of the dam. The wall of water took about five minutes to get there. “This was not the express train portrayed by pulp writers, but the generated destructive horsepower was impossible to visualize,” wrote historian Charles Outland. “With a depth varying from 100–140 feet for the first few miles, nothing could withstand the violence of the flood wave. Huge pieces of the dam, some weighing 10,000 tons, were washed down the canyon.” The massive power station was crushed as easily as an eggshell.

  Drawn by gravity, thundering forward at an initial speed of twenty miles per hour, the flood reached the end of the canyon, slammed against the walls of the Santa Clara Valley, and kicked sharply to the right, creating a swirling funnel of water that completely erased the village of Castaic Junction, wiping it clean as a slate. “At Castaic there was nothing left to indicate that any habitation ever existed there,” reported the Santa Paula Chronicle in an “extra” edition later that day. “Where the McIntyre service station, restaurant, garage, and camp buildings stood there is nothing but acres of mud and debris, in places 15 feet deep.”

  A tent city of construction workers, next in the way, was nearly obliterated. A few lucky men found themselves in tents snapped tightly shut that acted like balloons, floating on the flood. The water was now seventy feet high and bearing mangled bodies, trees, homes, and debris as it crossed into Ventura County, plowing toward the sea. Hundred-ton blocks of concrete rode the water like corks.

  Ahead lay the towns and villages of Piru, Fillmore, Bardsdale, and Santa Paula, where people were just becoming aware of the disaster about to engulf them. Police sirens sounded and residents were told to flee to the hills. Telephone operators—“‘Hello’ Girls,” the Santa Paula Chronicle dubbed them—stuck to their posts in Santa Paula and Fillmore, making call after call while the flood came closer.

  Other tales of heroism, tragedy, and random luck took shape. George Bassolo of Fillmore drowned when the wave hit his car as he attempted to cross a bridge. “A passenger, whose name was unknown, escaped when he was thrown free of the car and washed up in an orange tree,” reported the Santa Paula Chronicle. The Coffers, from Piru, were caught unawares as they slept. Mrs. Coffer drowned when her ship bed tipped over after banging into a tree stump, while her husband and son were saved. The four members of the Gordon Cummings family of Bardsdale got onto the roof of their house. The roof was torn away, but they floated on it like a raft—thinking for a few giddy, terrified minutes that they would survive—until the roof hit debris and broke up, drowning them all. Another rancher blew a hole in the roof of his home with a shotgun, and while he was pushing his children out onto the roof, the entire house swirled away, bearing them all to unlikely safety.

  Some who spoke only Spanish didn’t understand the warnings they’d been given. Instead of fleeing they gathered on the long steel bridge spanning the Santa Clara River between Bardsdale and Fillmore. Perhaps they thought they’d be safe, or maybe they wanted to see what was happening. The bridge was torn from its foundations and hurled hundreds of feet when the water hit. One woman surfed the flood with her three children, floating on a mattress until it snagged on a tree and they were saved. A Mexican farmer raced in his truck ahead of the onrushing waters, taking many to safety—until he made one trip too many and his truck was
hed away and he drowned. One survivor lost his mind and was found wandering in the hills, naked, two days later. Highway patrolman Thornton Edwards was the night’s Paul Revere, speeding up and down the valley in the dark to warn people.

  The flood passed Santa Paula at 3:30 A.M. and surged toward the Pacific beyond Mantalvo. Back upstream, the St. Francis Reservoir had almost completely emptied itself, leaving a wet carpet of oozy mud, shimmering beneath the light of an aging moon.

  Nobody knows how many people died as a result of the failure of the St. Francis. The Santa Paula Chronicle reported at first that more than a thousand people lost their lives, along with tens of thousands of animals. These days historians reckon the human loss anywhere between 400 and 700. Many bodies were never found.

  “Never in the history of America has there been a disaster more tragic, nor one which came so quickly or brutally,” was the conclusion of a later Joint Citizens Report. “The invincible wall of water, possessed it seemed of some malicious devil, struck without warning, in the dark of night, trapping scores of families asleep without means or hope of escape.”

  Behind the tragedy lay politics, human error, and, accused the Santa Paula Chronicle, “the actions of a foreign and selfish water board”—the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP). The dam should never have been built. Cracks had appeared along its surface months before, prompting locals, anxious about the muddy brown water seeping through the abutment, to resort to gallows humor. “I’ll see you soon,” they’d say, “unless she gives.”

  On the afternoon of March 12 the dam’s architect, William Mulholland, the DWP’s famed chief engineer, came out from the city to inspect the leaks. Mulholland had built the dam to provide Los Angeles with a year’s worth of backup water supply, because people were dynamiting the titanic aqueduct system he’d built to bring water to the city from the Owens River Valley, some 300 miles away on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. Los Angeles had grown—and was continuing to grow, at ever greater speed—out of desert land, and its existence depended on any desert’s most precious resource: water. Mulholland had completed his aqueduct in 1913. He turned on a gushing spigot, pointed to the water, and in a laconic and legendary pronouncement, said: “There it is. Take it.” Farmers in the Owens River Valley, cheated of their water and livelihoods, had been angry ever since. Some sabotaged the aqueduct: there was, in effect, a war over water. To make matters worse, Los Angeles was enduring a cycle of drought—hence the need for additional supply, a reservoir or dam. Mulholland spurned other, perhaps more favorable, sites and opted instead for the San Francisquito Canyon. He was an arrogant and brilliant man; his drive and vision helped invent L.A. Perhaps he believed himself infallible. He began building the St. Francis Dam in 1924, finished it three years later, and at the end of his inspection on March 12, 1928, pronounced it safe and sound.

  Only a few hours later, catastrophe struck. At first Mulholland blamed saboteurs, then shouldered the blame himself. People who knew him said his face aged twenty years. “Apparently we overlooked something,” Mulholland would tell a coroner. “It’s very hard for me to say it. And the only ones I envy are the dead.”

  The bursting of the dam put out electricity all over Ventura County, but the telephones were still working. Leslie White’s phone rang at about 2 A.M. on the morning of March 13. On the line was his friend Roy Pinkerton, editor of the Ventura County Star, a new paper with a circulation of less than 5,000. “The St. Francis has just gone,” Pinkerton said.

  White grabbed his camera and headed to a local airfield where Pinkerton had arranged for a small plane to rush him to the scene. The plane flew south and beat its way through thick, low-hanging sea fog toward Santa Paula. As dawn crept into the sky, White saw “bridges swept away, homes floating in a muddy torrent where only the day before cattle had grazed. We could distinguish vague dots struggling in the turbulent surface. We could not understand, at the time, that we were watching people die below us.” The swift high waters had whipped away almost every bit of vegetation from the valley slopes. Orange groves and apricot orchards and fields of beans and alfalfa were leveled. A few houses stood strangely intact, the flood having missed them by inches. Uprooted railroad tracks stuck out of the torrent like twisted spaghetti, sleepers hanging from them at crazy angles. Vultures already circled, swooping down to peck at animal and human debris. White took photographs that Roy Pinkerton sold to the Los Angeles Examiner. For White, though, this was only the beginning of his involvement.

  In the flood’s immediate aftermath, tempers ran explosively high. The subject is hot in the Santa Clara Valley even today. The nub was this: Los Angeles County water had killed Ventura County people. “This is no time to sit idly by in the midst of hysteria,” said the Santa Paula Chronicle. “Los Angeles Should Pay.” The big white chiefs of Ventura County—the politicians, the ranchers whose properties had been damaged or destroyed—called for restitution and prepared for a claim by commissioning a detailed record of the tragedy. Leslie White was recruited to number and photograph each body as it was found.

  Mud-caked cadavers were stacked high in hastily improvised morgues, one of which was established in the Masonic Hall at Newhall, aka the Hap-A-Lan dance hall. An old sign above the door said “Welcome”; inside were bodies with sheets thrown over them. “The force of the water was so great that none of the victims recovered on the first day had on so much as a stitch of clothing,” wrote White. He moved up and down the valley, driving from Newhall to a mortuary in Santa Paula, to a pharmacy in Piru where corpses were also piled. Many were twisted and battered, mauled by water and debris. They lay on long pine planks, where they’d been washed off with garden hoses so White could photograph them.

  As the days went by, the work became more and more grisly. White photographed, for instance, the Cowdens, an entire family that had been wiped out. The bodies of father, son, and daughter washed up quickly but the mother, Corinna Cowden, was found days later, already in such an advanced state of decomposition that her eyes and nose were gone. Some corpses, buried in silt and protected from the air, were well preserved even when found more than a week later. Others were rotten with maggots and vegetation, nothing appearing human except the rows of grinning teeth. So little remained of some bodies that the pieces were stored in small baskets.

  On March 20 White set out on a different kind of expedition. Together with Bernie Isensee, another Ventura photographer, and an armed deputy sheriff, Carl Wallace (a future intimate of J. Edgar Hoover), White crossed the county line back into L.A. County to photograph what was left of the dam. Isensee, soon to quit photography and become a highway patrolman (a later picture shows a handsome man in jodhpurs and aviator shades), owned a stereoscopic camera that produced negatives fifty inches wide. The men set up their equipment above the dam, with White shooting from the exact spot that Isensee covered in his wider version. Then they worked their way back toward the sea, along the path the flood had taken, selecting different vantage points from which to take more and more pictures. The eighteen huge images made by Isensee remain the most striking visual record of the scale of the flood, showing a skyscraper-high dam destroyed, an enormous reservoir emptied, an entire landscape and hundreds of buildings leveled.

  At one point during the day, the men paused at the end of a washed-out road for a group photo. White set up his camera on a tripod, set a timer, and walked back into the shot so he could be a part of it. Indeed, he stands smack at the photo’s center, a cocky little rooster of a guy, looking all business with his hat pulled down a little over one eye and his hands on his hips.

  Los Angeles quickly agreed to make restitution. Money came from the DWP, from the Harbor Board, from L.A. County, and from individuals. Claims were adjudicated without going to court. Precise dollar and cent values were given for property loss and loss through death. A racial element came into play here: Nora McDougal, for instance, received a $15,000 settlement for the death of one adult, while Emilio Quezada received $500 for a sim
ilar loss. But Spanish-speaking victims signed off on the papers, receiving much less than their English-speaking counterparts, and L.A. got what it wanted—the chance to move on and start forgetting that the St. Francis Dam ever existed. Nobody knows exactly how much was paid—estimates vary from $5.5 million to $25 million in 1928 dollars. Roy Pinkerton wrote that $7 million had been paid by the mid-1930s. Meanwhile the water levels in the Hollywood Reservoir—held in place by the Mulholland Dam, a sister to the St. Francis and built along the same lines—were immediately lowered, and the dam itself was scaled back. Nobody wanted another disaster, least of all the DWP.

  The first checks were handed to Ventura County victims and their families within months, while Leslie White went about the mournful task of helping to identify the corpses that were still showing up. “For weeks the authorities continued to bring in putrid corpses which had to be carefully examined and photographed, and for months skeletons were found on the great scar left by the flood,” he said. What he saw would haunt him for the rest of his life.