A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age Read Free Page B

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 washed 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