Californian Dam Disaster

Evening Star, Issue 19841, 14 April 1928, Page 4

Californian Dam Disaster

An Avalanche of Destruction

Towns and Orchards Carried Away

Heroism and Tragedy

Tales of Survivors and Rescuers

[From our own Corersfondent.]

Los Angeles, March 21. A sixty-five-mile slash through the very heart of a most beautiful valley, two newspaper men followed that stillbleeding wound from the spot where the torrent spewed its brownish flood to sully the white surf of the Pacific Ocean, thence to where the water giant burst from its narrow canyon lair exulting in its first gulp of human lives. They twice staggered and stumbled through the rushing waters of tho little Santa Clara river, red with mud, and rainbow-tinted with its oil coating. They rode the highway patches, walked and ran through the heavy mud. They stalked through the slippery slime —all for a prize more precious than a pot of gold. For they found that men could chuckle at their own deeds of valor, and women could carry on dry-eyed, although hearts were breaking. They heard tho sages of a dozen heroes. And greatest of these was Ed Locke in this great disaster of the engulfing of a dozen flourishing Californian towns by the breaking of tho reservoir dam of St. Francis, some forty-five miles north of Los Angeles, releasing as it did some 62,000 acres of water in a wall 75ft high, which dashed in tho early hours of tho morning and swamped tho sleeping inhabitants by the hundred, carrying everything before the avalanche of water. Guard of the Southern California Edison Company construction camp at Blue Bend, Ed Locke saved the lives of at least forty-seven men, and died with his boots on and his bolt and gun about his waist. “ Scotty Gordon, a grey-bearded Scotch little rancher and a hero in his own right, chuckled and laughed as he told of the deed of Ed Locke. “ Wo found Ed Locke with his gun and belt on where ho fell,” he said, “ and—ha, ha, ha-a, a jug of wine at his side. Someone had put it there.” . “ And mighty good work it did this day.” said R. A. Newell, special agent of the Edison camp, and one of those

who escaped, as he clung to the running board of “Scotty’s” little flivver coupe,' in which the rancher all day taxied men over his own little stretch of highway with never a word of the fare. “ One hundred and thirty-eight 1 counted at the dinner table last night. So far as 1 know, only forty-nine of us live. Ed Locke ran up and down the row of tents without a thought of his own. skin. T was one of them that found his body.” At Santa Paula, approximately twenty miles from the destroyed dam, the south end of the town, comprising the Mexican quarter, was carried away. Tills section ordinarily housed between 600 and 1.000 persons. The undertaking parlors wore filled with bodies. Jn Fillmore, Santa. Paula, and Moor Park more than ninety bodies of flood victims wore recovered on the day Pillowing the avalanche of water from the reservoir. Tile body of the proprietor of the M‘i ntyro service station at Castaic Junction was found at Fillmore, having been carried by the flood fifteen imFs. Nurses were rushed from Santa Paula, to Fillmore, where there was not a, single one available. The Santa. Paula schoolhousc, in the centre of Santa Paula, was converted into a Red (Voss station, where food and clothing wore supplied to refugees and scores of injured cases were treated, Most of the injured were mcmlicrs of parties engaged in recovering t bodies, who had stepped on nails and jagged rocks. leu bridges were washed out in this region. Around Saticoy great portions of the highway wore carried away, and heavy damages were wrought, to the inagiitliceiiAutrus groves, some of the finest in the world. From the lower slopes of Santa Paula one hundred houses, most of them belonging to Mexicans, were carried out by tho waters, flic surrounding orange and renion groves were just given a good sweeping by the waters, except for a scissors-like slit cut through the main river bed.

ONE TAKEN AND THE OTHER LEFT

A motor cycle officer had done a Paul Revere through the river district to warn the sleeping inhabitants of the waters, which arrived at 2.15 o’clock. In a school yard the American Red Cross fed the survivors. At the river crossing at Fillmore rescue parties poked ancl prodded at an 81't wall of bushwood, the tangled shreds of thousands of acres of orchards reaped by the' scythe of the flood. “Clifford Corwin was the lucky one,” said one of the band of workers —electricians replacing power lines, pipe fitters mending the broken oil pipe lines, and telephone system employees splashing through the muddy waters. The bridge bad been washed out and some of the lingo concrete blocks carried a mile down .stream. “He was riding with George Bnsola on the highway when the wall of water, 30ft high, came down. He grabbed the last tree of the last row of orange trees that remained standing.” Basola, not so lucky, lost Ins life. ... , . | Another told how a Inond climbed to the roof of bis home, bow the house popped up in the flood waters, tossing its human rider into a high eucalyptus tree. Several houses on the river side of Fillmore were carried _ away, while orchards almost half a mile wide were cleaned up, leaving scarcely a twig. “And that little Pete Lahara,_ laughed Scotty. “He hollered to Ins folks to run, but they said the noise was just the wind. Pete, sixteen years old he is, grabbed his ten-year-bid sister with _ one hand and his twelve-year-old sister with the otaer and ran to the hills. He stayed there all night without a stitch of clothing on, but saved tb© two kids. Pete, the old man, and his wife aro gone, and good neighbors they were, too.’ It had to be dragged from ‘ Scotty Gordon that be himself had braved the waters when be answered the call with other bill that morning and brought ashore eight bodies. And the women —rows of _ them sitting at the doorways or improvised morgues. Some of them with steps of children at their sides, others with —oh, so pitifnllv empty arms!

There were not men folks in those groups, and no one wondered why, tor the men were absent from the morgue watch joining in the search for relatives and friends, while other men were lost in the relentless flood. 'Throughout that trip from valley’s end to valley’s end not _ a weeping woman was seen. A Mexican woman with a babe in her arms sat stunned hcsiclo the peach trees’ bravo bloom. The only available vehicle for lure at Fjjlmorc was a large, heavy, troubleshooting automobile with a. derrick mounted on the roar. Jt thundered along the sometimes mud engnlied roadway on tho valley side _ in a district that ft few hours previously was a veritable Garden of Eden. “That is Ramona’s home,” quoth the driver as ho pointed out the ranch houses made famous in the Cahlornia romance. The low, tree-shaded adobe buildings were untouched by tbo torrent, but a slice was taken out of the orange orchard of the ranch on which Ramon’s homo stands, and which sold only four years ago for 700,000 dollars. A speeding motor car was met by the two wayfarers in quest of news. “There goes C. C. Elton,” said the driver. “Just last week he paid 102,000 dollars for his ranch. The flood just about wiped tho orchards out.” The little hillside main street, town of pirn, first reported to have caught the full blast of the flood, was skirted entirely by the grasping waters Its orchards in the lower part ol this narrowed valley were turned to more fields of sandy silt. From Pirn up the tragic valley was a desolate waste of sand and uprooted, mangled shade trees. The orchards which checker-boarded the lower valley in its mile width had disappeared. On an acre-sized mound at a bend on the river below a, steep hillside were the remains of the Edison Company s construction camp. . Not a tented camp remained, but instead it was an auto-wrecker’s delight. Jt was a rentable No Man’s Land in California, reminiscent of the World War in Flanders.

THE TRACK OF DESTRUCTION

On the edge of a ravine cut 20ft into earth a mud-covered sc .ring machine perched, crazily atilt. That was all there was left of a dozen houses that stood across the highway front the power plant a mile or so north of Saugus. Tho houses were gone. Everything that was in them was lost. '1 he place where they were was nothing but a broad glistening expanse of mud that squelched and sucked undeiToot to the investigator for bodies. It could be known that there were houses there, because here and there the mud lifted in irregular oblongs below squares. Under those places were the outlines of the concrete foundations; traces such as explorers find when they dig up ancient ruins. The people who lived in those houses, who wore asleep when the flood started down the valley in the dark, escaped—most of them—with their lives and nothing more. Furniture, automobiles, root's and walls, fences and trees—tho waters took them away, hurled them down in tho flood, tore them to tangled bits. There was a little settlement along the road, where children played and women planned their spring gardens and men came home from work. There was nothing there now—nothing but seas of mud. Only on horseback or by wading thigh-deep in mud was it possible to get to the edge of the huge pathway the waters cut for themselves. 'There was a field that was rich with tall alfalfa. It was green, but now was a dirty brown. Mud covered everything. The alfalfa lay flat to the earth, smooth, regular, as if an enormous brush had been drawn across it. Over what was dry land the mud was now sft thick in depth. The horses sank halfway up to their knees even in shallow daces. The mud clung and drew away reluctantly with heavy sucking noises. Suddenly the level land fell away. There was a steep bank, cut and pounded by the water into strange shapes. ft fell away, 40, 50ft in places. At the bottom was a river bed. But it was not a river bed. There was no river there until the flood made one. There was sand, wet and glistening. There were, great trees wrenched out of the ground and piled like matches. There was an Sin pipe line twisted like a string. There were huge tangles of brush matted 20ft high. Several hundred feet wide the flood raced through there. On the other side the water was etaS jpimaaig saHeuljr over another

steep bank, thick brown water sonp> with mud. Now and again a section of bank trembled and pulled loose sluggishly. It was well not to ride too near the edge. Across the drenched brown fields men were moving very slowly with' their eyes on the ground. They trudged in irregular lines, spread out across the waste land. '1 hey were looking for the dead. Up in the hills where the waters pounded and tore their way through there were little ranches, hidden away in tiny valleys. Some of the people from those randies had come lowlands and had been rescued. I hoy found a ton-year-old boy when .someone saw a foot thrusting out of the mud. They found a rcd-haiicd man so tangled and twisted into the brandies of ii tree that they had to cut away the branches to take Ids body out. No ono knew but many other bodies were encased in the sea, of mud below, lip in the hills were found dead horses, but no sign of humans. Sixteen bodies wore discovered at the lamoiis ranch of Harry Carev, the cinema lavorite. No one knew ‘what had happened to the Edison camp nearest to the dam. There were sixty-five men up there, some with their families. And there was a little schoollioii.se where the teacher lived. Rumors and reports (lew like mad. Mud-spattered men mine riding into Saugus to tell of what happened to this or that ranch or tiny settlement. Someone said it was just midnight when the electric lights went out-—that was when the break came. And it was forty minutes later when the piled water hammered its way through the fences and trees and houses on the way, sixteen miles trom the shattered dam. It took only forty minutes to change the face of a countryside. The blinding Hashes of Jiigb-power electric linos thrown to the ground and put out of commission by the fioon from the St. Francis dam came as the first warning to the people in the valley below' that “something had iiapBert Lewis, an employee at Mood s garage in Saugus, told the story of how the first word of the breaking of the dam came. “ 1 saw those Hashes and knew that something had happened, hut I didn’t know what it was,” Lewis said. “The flashes kept going on and off for about a hour, and then an eraployee of the Southern Culifornian itchson came in and told mo what had happened. “He telephoned to Los Angeles, and

then I went out with him and some others to do what we could. 1 found the first two bodies. They were two young fellows. They didn t have a stitch ou either of them. They looked just like they had been in bed when the water hit them, and did not know what hit’ them. Some farmers told us that it seemed like the water came in a wall about 75ft high when it came from the dam down the canyon. The canyon is pretty narrow below the dam, you l,"w, And it made a roaring sound —just like a thunderstorm. Some of the farmers we found said they thought an earthquake caused tho dam to break, but everybody up here thought it was pretty weak before that. They said when they first built the darn it cracked on them once. “The whole valley below the dam was swept clean. I never saw the like of it in my life. Houses, trees, telephone poles, barns, haystacks, everything was swept away, and it looked like the bed of a big river when the water began to go down, ft is still roaring ovei there, though. \ou can still hear it. and they tell nw there arc bridges washed out all along. ’

TRAGEDY OH TRAGEDY

C. H. Hunick, aged eighty, related at Newhall, in the emergency hospital, how he was rescued by one of his sous from the, swirling waters of the flood just as he had given up all hope ot being saved. “Our ranch house, he said “was located a mile and a-halt below the dam When the water hit it tho house crumpled as though it. were built ot cards. L could not see a thing in the darkness, hut found myself clinging to what turned out to be a part of the roof of our house. Down, down with the current we went. 1. held on desperately. I kept saying to knew that f could not last long. 1 knew that .1 could not last long. >• am old, and my strength was going fast, but. 1 hung on. Then—l must have floated for miles— somebody grabbed inv arm in the darkness. .Is it you, dad?’ I knew that it, was one of 'my sons. Ho got me over to the plank ho was on. J don t remember much after that. I wonder it they saved the two other boys.' They did not tell the old man that the bodies of tho two sous for whom he inquired lay in a temporary morgue near by. The .Harry Carey ranch, where toe lilm actor-owner has staged many rodeos, was a picture of ruin. EveiyHiing had been covered by the rush of water except the owner’s cottage. On n hillock there stood the pitiful figure of a little woman, huddled in a vivid red sweater, wringing her hands. Her name was Mrs Russell Hnlen, and she stated that her little daughter had lived with her grandmother up San Franciscoquito Canyon. She pointed to the place where the grandmother s small home had stood beside a cottonwood tree. It was nothing but a flat, billiard table like surface of yellow sand, and the cottonwood tree had been stripped even nl its bark by the wild waters. . ~ , A graphic description ot flic navoo wrought by tho terrible disaster was penned by Horace Bristol, wbo chaitcred an aeroplane and flew from ono end to the other over the stricken area. Bristol’s narrative said; ‘ Death and destruction, such as Southern California has never witnessed before, hold undisputed sway over the entire length of the ones beautiful Santa Clara River Valley, now a dreary mud waste, as a result, of the collapse of (he great St. Francis dam. ... . . , “ Viewed from a spocially-chartciod aeroplane, in which I made a circuit of the valley, the Hooded area presents a tragic panorama. Washed-out bridges, wrecked homes, many of them still filled with dead; freight cars and automobiles smashed into twisted wreckage bv tho surging flood waters of destruction can be seen almost everywhere one looks. In the centre of this of death crawls the Santa Clara Rive? a mmldv serpent two miles wide, winding and twisting its way lor fortythree miles from Newhall through f iru, Fillmore, Santa Paula, and Saticoy. “Through the roar of the aeroplane motor one. muses tho uncanny silence that reigns in tha waste bciow. A giueBoiiio coating of black, brown, mud deposited by the raging waters irced from the crumpled dam, mantles a vast area estimated to measure more than 100.000 acres. One hates to think of a lorccd landing in tho swampy 00/.c. “ Rdliim along roads leading to the stricken town of Santa Paula ono sees trucks piled high with bodies Ibo whole area is patrolled by deputy sheriffs, volunteer police, Boy Scouts, and volunteer workers, many of whom tramp along knee deep in mud searching for bodies. . , . “From tho aeroplane it looks as it everv square mile of San h ranciscoduito Canyon and the fertile Santa Paula Valley had been swept clean nt orchard and home and camp ranch by the twelve billion-gallon death sweep of the flood avalanche. Everything is just a desolate waste of silt and destruction.” ,1, The aerial view of Iho wrecked dam was like a picture of a broken toy. Both right and left wings of the structure were broken and swept away, tho central section, 185 ft high, remaining upright, a monument to the cataclysm. Nothing remained in the wreckage that remotely resembled a building. Railway tracks were twisted like spaghetti. Fate plaved cruelly with one rancher, who foresaw the danger, and thought be was out of its reach. He loaded bis three children into a small motor car. and then stopped for a moment to warn a. neighbor, tvien he turned back to his car it had bVen swept away, human cargo and all. Rosa. Samango battled against the flood for two hours, with her aged mother in her arms. She won her fight and reached shore. The mother was dead, and her father was missing. A colonv of citrus growers was wiped out south-west of Santa Paula, and m another instance a father lost his wife and Ills seven children, as well a.s all his belongings, and Ids ranch was washed away.