St. Francis Dam Disaster (Images of America)

Francis dam brought a tragic end to the career of William Mulholland. This is a story of grand visions, violence, political power and intrigue, interweaving engineering detail with accounts of personal tragedy and heroism.

The events of the St. Francis Dam disaster are also a technological detective story. Why did the dam collapse? What happened during the aftermath? Could it have been avoided? What lessons are there to be learned today? Many such questions about the collapse are still debated, more than seven decades later. Estimates put the dam officially collapsing at It is believed that Harnischfeger, his girlfriend and their son were the first ones to perish.

There are no first-hand accounts from anyone who actually saw the dam break; anyone who did see it would presumably have been killed instantly. Seconds later, the water took out the nearby power lines, leaving the canyon in total darkness. Ray Rising was one of only three people from a nearby community who survived the disaster; his wife and two daughters did not make it through alive.

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William Mulholland was the savior of Southern California until he wasn’t

A giant killer hornet war is waged between two colonies, and the resources, territories, and survival of a new generation are at stake. The only theory to vary greatly from the others was that of Bailey Willis , Carl E. Grunsky and his son. They believed that the portion of the east abutment below the dam was the first to give way, clearing the way for the collapse to take place. Their investigations, while somewhat in collaboration, culminated in two reports, one by the Grunskys and the other by Dr.

Willis, which were completed in April These reports, according to Carl Grunsky, "were reached independently" and "are in substantial agreement. Willis and the Grunskys agreed with the other engineers and investigators on the poor quality and deteriorating conditions of the entire foundation, although they maintained that a critical situation developed on the east abutment.

Willis, the geologist of the investigative team, was most likely the first to discover the "old landslide" within the mountains which had made the eastern abutment for the dam. In his report, he discussed it at great length and the Grunskys drew substantially on it, as they did his analysis of the schist, for their own report. The Grunskys, as civil engineers, took the lead in that area of the investigation, and in describing the role played by "hydrostatic uplift". Uplift takes its name from its tendency to lift a dam upward. Although many designers and builders of dams had become aware of this phenomenon by the late s to early s, it was still not generally well understood or appreciated.

Nevertheless, it was becoming a matter of debate and a concern to dam builders of this era that water from a reservoir could seep under a dam and exert pressure upward. Due for the most part to inadequate drainage of the base and side abutments, the phenomenon of uplift destabilizes gravity dams by reducing the structure's "effective weight", making it less able to resist horizontal water pressure.

Uplift can act through the bedrock foundation: According to their theories, water from the reservoir had permeated far back into the schist formation of the eastern abutment. This lubricated the rock and it slowly began to move, exerting a tremendous amount of weight against the dam, which according to the Grunskys was already becoming less stable due to "uplift.

Willis established, was that the conglomerate, on which the western abutment of the dam rested, reacted upon becoming wet by swelling. In fact, the amount of swelling was such that it would raise any structure built upon it. They reveal that in some areas the wall was 2 to 6 inches higher than when built. As soon as the dam was loosened on its base the toe of the structure spalled off.

This was probably the beginning of its breaking up, and probably occurred sometime after Thereupon, quite likely, a part of the east end of the dam, meanwhile undermined, went out and the dam at this end lost its hillside support. Hydrostatic uplift at the already loose west and the weight of the remaining portion of the undermined east end caused a temporary tilting of the dam towards the east, accompanied by a rapid washing away of the hillside under the dam at its west end which then also began to break up.

The reservoir water was now rushing with tremendous force against both ends and against the upstream face of all that was standing of the dam. This rush of water carried away huge blocks of concrete from both ends of the dam There was and remains a difference of professional opinions on the amount of time that elapsed, shown by the chart made by the Stevens automatic water level recorder, from when the line indicating the reservoir level broke sharply downward until it became perpendicular. Most investigating engineers feel the amount of time indicated on the chart is thirty to forty minutes, not the twenty-three minutes that Grunsky stated.

In support of his theory of the dam tilting, Grunsky pointed to an odd clue near the western lower edge of the standing section. Here a ladder had become wedged in a crack that had opened apparently during this rocking or tilting process and then had become tightly pinched in place as the section settled back on its foundation.

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Measurements taken proved the crack must have been much wider at the time that the ladder entered it. Further, surveys indeed showed the center section had been subjected to severe tilting or twisting. These surveys established that the center section had moved 5. Although this investigation was insightful and informative, the theory, along with others which hypothesized an appreciably increasing amount of seepage just prior to the failure, becomes less likely when it is compared against the eyewitness accounts of the conditions in the canyon and near the dam during the last thirty minutes before its collapse.

This action would have the dam in motion as a singular unit while conversely, testimony given at the Coroner's Inquest indicates that the dam was fractured transversely in at least four places. Furthermore, the two cracks, which bordered each side of the standing center section, would have served as hinges to prevent this. The center section, which had become known as "The Tombstone" due to a newspaper reporter's description of it as such, became an attraction for tourists and souvenir hunters.

In May , the upright section was toppled with dynamite, and the remaining blocks were demolished with bulldozers and jackhammers to discourage the sightseers and souvenir hunters from exploring the ruins. The wing dike was used by Los Angeles firemen to gain experience in using explosives on building structures. Francis Dam was not rebuilt, though Bouquet Reservoir in nearby Bouquet Canyon was built in as a replacement.

To this day, the exact number of victims remains unknown. The official death toll in August was , but the remains of victims continued to be discovered every few years until the mids. The remains of a victim were found deep underground near Newhall in , and other bodies, believed to be victims of the disaster, were found in the late s and The current death toll is estimated to be at least At the Coroner's Inquest, the leak that Tony Harnischfeger had spotted was cited as evidence that the dam was leaking on the day of the break, and that both the Bureau of Water Works and Supply and Mulholland were aware of it.

Mulholland told the jury he had been at the dam the day of the break, due to the dam keeper's call, but neither he nor Van Norman had observed anything of concern, nor found any dangerous conditions. Mulholland further testified that leaks in dams, especially of the type and size of the St. During the Inquest Mulholland said, "This inquest is a very painful thing for me to have to attend but it is the occasion of it that is painful.

The only ones I envy about this thing are the ones who are dead. If there was an error in human judgment, I was the human, I won't try to fasten it on anyone else. The Coroner's Inquest jury determined that one of the causative factors for the disaster lay in what they had termed as "an error in engineering judgment in determining the foundation at the St.

Francis Dam site and deciding on the best type of dam to build there" and that "the responsibility for the error in engineering judgment rests upon the Bureau of Water Works and Supply, and the Chief Engineer thereof. The hearings also recommended that "the construction and operation of a great dam should never be left to the sole judgment of one man, no matter how eminent. His assistant, Harvey Van Norman, succeeded him as chief engineer and general manager.

In later years, he retreated into a life of semi-isolation. He died in , at the age of In response to the St. Francis Dam disaster, the California legislature created an updated dam safety program and eliminated the municipal exemption. Before this was added, a municipality having its own engineering department was completely exempt from regulation. On August 14, , the Department of Public Works, under the administrative oversight of the State Engineer, which was later assumed by the Division of Safety of Dams, was given authority to review all non-federal dams over 25 feet high or which would hold more than 50 acre-feet of water.

The new legislation also allowed the state to employ consultants, as they deemed necessary. Additionally, the state was given full authority to supervise the maintenance and operation of all non-federal dams. Having determined that the unregulated design of construction projects constituted a hazard to the public, the California legislature passed laws to regulate civil engineering and, in , created the state Board of Registration for Civil Engineers now the Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists.

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The failure of the dam is now believed to have begun with the eastern abutment of the dam giving way, possibly due to a landslide. This scenario, having its roots in the works of Willis and Grunsky, was expanded upon by the author Charles Outland in his book Man-Made Disaster: The Story of St. Francis Dam which was first published in The material on which the eastern abutment of the dam had been built may itself have been part of an ancient landslide, but this would have been impossible for almost any geologists of the s to detect.

Indeed, the site had been inspected twice, at different times, by two of the leading geologists and civil engineers of the day, John C. Branner of Stanford University and Carl E. Grunsky ; neither found fault with the San Francisquito rock. David Rogers, [77] inspired by the work of Outland, investigated the failure and published an extensive scenario, albeit somewhat controversial, of the possible geological and rock mechanic actions which may have led to the dam's failure.



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He attributed the failure to three major factors: A critique of Rogers's historical analysis of the dam's collapse was published in the journal California History in by historians Norris Hundley Jr. Jackson Professor, Lafayette College. While accepting most of his geological analysis of the failure, the article makes clearer the differences and deficiencies of the structure built in San Francisquito Canyon and how it fell short of the standards for large-scale concrete gravity dams as practiced by other prominent dam engineers in the s.

Shortly after the disaster, many living below Mulholland Dam , which creates the Hollywood Reservoir , feared a similar disaster and began to protest and petitioned the City of Los Angeles to drain the reservoir and remove the dam. An External Review Panel to evaluate the structure, convened by the State of California, followed this in Although the state's panel did not recommend modification of the dam, both panels came to similar conclusions that the dam lacked what was then considered sufficient uplift relief.

That may have led to destabilization, and was unacceptable. Again in , a fourth panel, the Board of Engineers to Evaluate Mulholland Dam, was appointed to assess the structure. Certain design deficiencies, which had been made by the engineering department during the planning phase of the dam, were uncovered. These had to do with the dam's base width in conjunction to its ability to resist uplift, sliding and to withstand earthquake loading.

The decision was made to permanently keep the Hollywood Reservoir drawn down. This work was carried out in — The only visible remains of the St. Francis Dam are weathered, broken chunks of gray concrete and the rusted remnants of the handrails that lined the top of the dam and the wing dike.

The Story of the St. Francis Dam

The ruins and the scar from the ancient landslide can be seen from San Francisquito Canyon Road. Large chunks of debris can still be found scattered about the creek bed south of the dam's original site. The site of the disaster is registered as California Historical Landmark The road sustained heavy storm damage in , and when rebuilt, it was routed away from both the remains of the dam and the damaged portion of the roadway.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Francis Dam View of the dam looking north, with water in its reservoir February Francis Dam Disaster Site".

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Memorialization and Memory of Southern California's St. Francis Dam Disaster of California State University, Northridge Thesis. Francis Dam Disaster Victims". Historical Society of Southern California. Year of the L. Retrieved 11 March Retrieved November 20, Reassessment of the St. William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles. Berkeley and Los Angeles: