The entry quotes William Mulholland on the stand. This piece follows him through the transcript. The Los Angeles County coroner, Frank A. Nance, empanelled a jury on 19 March 1928 to inquire into the death of Julia Rising, aged twenty-nine, of Power House No. 2, “et al”; it was sworn in the Hall of Justice at ten in the morning of 21 March, sat until 10 April, and gave its verdict on 12 April. The nine jurors were Irving C. Harris, a consulting engineer, who was foreman; S. C. Lines; Blaine Noice; O. G. Bowen; C. D. Walz; William H. Eaton; H. G. Holabird, an appraiser; R. F. Ware; and Z. N. Nelson. Six of the nine, Engineering News-Record noted, were engineers or contractors. The questions came from the coroner, from the jurors, and from the deputy district attorney, E. J. Dennison. The transcript runs to 825 pages in the scan, in two volumes, typed and carbon-copied; the OCR of it is rough, and the words given here are the ones it carries legibly. The witnesses who sat in the same chair before and after him are in the companion piece “The other witnesses”.

The first day

The first witness on 21 March was the doctor who had examined the bodies. The second was Mulholland, seventy-two, who had been in charge of the water of Los Angeles for forty-two years. He was asked first about the Monday.

“The keeper telephoned us that the water was dirty,” he said, “and we went up there and the water was not dirty and had not been dirty, but it was cutting.” Muddy water from under a dam “is taken as a very bad characteristic of a leak through the earth anywhere. It means the earth is cutting, but there was no earth coming from under the dam.” The earth was the loose dirt of an old construction road that the new leak ran across. The leak itself “came out of the joint between the masonry and the ground”; Van Norman had climbed to within ten feet of it, and Mulholland, who said he “was disinclined” to climb in where Van Norman was, had watched from below. “The water came out of the leak and it was as clear as glass.” Was it carrying silt? “No sir.” Asked by a juror what he estimated the flow to be, he said “About a second foot”, and that it was “not increasing at that time, but manifestly since it broke out the day before, and it started at nothing”.

“When you saw the dam last Monday did it occur to you that it was in danger?” “No, sir, it never occurred to me that it was in danger. I just wanted to see the new leak, naturally.” “Can you account for this dam going out?” “I surely would like to. I would like to be able to say in what manner it went out, why it fell.”

He was asked what the dam had been for. “The conservation of water,” he said, and then, because the jury was of the city, he said what the city was. “The City of Los Angeles is one of the unfortunate cities in regard to a water supply. We live under a hazard here. The people of the City of Los Angeles take this as a matter of course, that there is going to be water in the faucet the next morning.” He had been in charge of the works for nearly fifty years, “and we could not exist without reservoirs at all.”

Had he exercised the care an engineer should? “The conventional observations used in building dams. I have had rather more experience than most engineers in building dams. I have built nineteen of them and took the usual precautions, judging the formation the best I could, the stresses which the dam must be exposed to and all the things that relate to the continuous safety of the dam. We overlooked something. This inquiry is a very painful thing for me to have to attend, but it is the occasion of it that is painful.”

The rock on the east, he said, was “a hard igneous mica schist”; the word “schist”, he told the jury, “is the German for solid”. He had tunnelled into the conglomerate on the west “to find out if it was secure to build part of the dam. It was quite solid and very impervious.” Asked what pressure the dam had been built to withstand, he said: “Not in units, but it was about three times the resultant” of the height of water behind it. Asked whether the outlets could have saved it, he said that with all of them open they “could not have lowered that water more than an inch or two a day in the reservoir”. “The only thing you could do was warn the people and let the dam go?” “That is all, just the same as any big dam anywhere.”

Then the question that the valley wanted asked. “Have you any explanation as to the cause of the failure of this dam?” He had a suspicion, he said, “and I don’t want to divulge it. It is a very serious thing to make a charge.” The coroner pressed him: this was an important matter to everybody. “Yes, sir, I don’t want to offer it even.” He had sworn an oath, he said, “and I swear to God that this oath is as binding on me as” any he had taken. The suspicion, which everyone in the room understood, was that the men of the Owens Valley who had dynamited the aqueduct in 1924 and 1927 had dynamited the dam. Every board that looked for it found nothing.

“Was it not an utter impossibility to build that dam with any factor of safety in the manner in which it was built?” “If I thought that was the case I would not have built it. A great many men make mistakes and everybody is liable.” “What would you say if you had to do it over again, build that dam?” “I will answer that frankly and say, I would not.” Not in that manner? “I build all dams in that manner.” Then what did he mean? “Not in the same place.” Why not? “Well, it fell this time and there is a hoodoo on it, that would be enough.” “A hoodoo?” “Yes, it is vulnerable against human aggression, and I would not build” there again.

A juror asked whether the dam had settled. “We had observations on it, as we have on all the new dams, and there was no displacement, no distortion. That isn’t always the case with dams, sometimes we find dams yield quite perceptibly.” Had any employee told him they were afraid of it? “Absolutely none, no sir.” If he had realised it was likely to break? “I would have sent a Paul Revere alarm up and down the Valley.” Of the concrete, which was being blamed in the newspapers, he said: “Every engineer that comes in gives a sigh of relief that it wasn’t the concrete.”

The holes

Mulholland was recalled in the inquest’s second week. A juror wanted to know whether he had looked at the test holes after they were filled with water. “I ordered the holes in, was very much interested in their behavior, put a big hole at the top, filled it full of water, and it was there about two weeks, and the conglomerate was no softer than it was afterwards, had to bail the hole out, the conglomerate was very tight.” He had had holes and tunnels dug “all over, the north flank of the hill”, and “two or three tunnels up the right flank of that dyke, was very much interested in that dyke to see if I could make a dam out of it”, and “my conclusion was if I could make a dam as good as that, I would be through making a dam, that is permanent”. The conglomerate, he said, “is hard, been wet for two and one half years, perfectly firm to walk on. You have all been up there, perfectly firm, doesn’t run into mud.” He had examined it “under a microscope and everything else. I know it is vitreous, not a clay at all.”

“Mr. Mulholland, why didn’t you underdrain?” “There was no water in the formation. That formation dry as a bone.” And then: “We have the fact that the dam fell.” “I have a deep appreciation of the job before you, gentlemen. Don’t imagine for a minute that I would throw you off the scent. I am willing to take my medicine like a man. If there is anything I can say that will help you in your disclosures, I will be the very first to point it out if I see it first. I have nothing to conceal.”

He had, he said, “a very strong opinion myself as to what was the approximate cause of that failure”, and the jury asked for it. He would not give it; the bureau had three geologists at work, “one of them the very best in the union, Mr. Hill”, and “whatever they find they will publish to the world”. The transcript records at this point: “(witness weeping)”. A juror asked, gently, whether it had been intimated that for the last two or three years he had been letting up and delegating to his subordinates. “I haven’t been letting up. I believe I have been working harder than I ever did in my life. I haven’t had a day off. The only vacation in my lifetime, about three months ago, the only vacation I ever took, the only time I have taken a vacation in fifty years, went through the Panama Canal to New York. I am the first up in the morning, and the last to go to bed, with my men.” Then: “Whether it is good or bad, don’t blame anybody else, you just fasten it on me. If there is an error of human judgment, I was the human. I won’t try to fasten it on anybody else.”

The coroner put to him what the jury had learned that morning from the office engineers: that the dam was “an adaptation of the dam originally designed for Hollywood, and, with some changes, the general scheme was applied for the St. Francis Dam”. “Yes sir, very little difference.” Was that done at his direction? “I think we all concluded that was the case. I can’t say the idea originated with me, we collaborated in the thing, as I do with most of my work.” It was wholly a departmental project? “Yes sir, we don’t let contracts.” Had the state inspected the site? Yes: the state engineer, McClure, had come at his request, though the law did not require it of a city. “I am not a strict caviler about the law, I like to comply as far as I can and go over the mark in conformity to the law, recognize there ought to be state inspection of such things, whether it is a municipality or not.” How long had McClure spent? “Didn’t spend but a half day, and he saw all there was to see in a half day, because there wasn’t much to see.” Of the dike on the ridge, which had stood: “I wish I had as good a dam as that across the canyon.”

Asked again about the leak of 12 March, he put it at “two or three miner’s inches” from the new place, “that was clear water, absolutely clear”, with another leak beside it and an acceleration in the whole “a couple of times, a little gradual tapering up”. Of the dam as a whole: “the dam was as tight a dam as ever I saw, up to the time it gave out.”

The board’s witness

In April the president of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners, Reginaldo F. del Valle, told the jury that the board had left the dam “entirely in the hands of Mr. Mulholland”, that none of its members had ever been an engineer, and that in twenty years on the commission “I have never seen anyone connected with the institution that more willingly took orders from his superiors”. Mulholland was recalled at once to supplement this. He had himself been a consultant, he said, to Arthur P. Davis on the Oakland utility district; in the aqueduct’s case he had insisted that the board hire three engineers to pass on it; but in general, “for the last ten or twelve years, I haven’t consulted with anybody, or but very few. I have frequent consultations with engineers, visiting engineers.” The city, he said, “is probably visited by more engineering talent than any other city in the world, on account of its unique difficulties with regard to the water supply”. Had he had geologists on the site? Not at that point, but he had known John C. Branner, “looked upon as head geologist of the United States”, who “knew precisely where the joint between the two rock formations was, he knew that of old”. Had Branner discussed the conglomerate’s inclination to absorb water? “No, I don’t remember. I know it was full for two and one half years, it would absorb water then.” He had helped found the Seismological Society. “I might say I was honored by having conferred upon me the LL.D. degree of the University of California, so don’t call me colonel any more, I am a doctor.”

Rogers, who read the Huntington Library’s copy of the transcript, says that Mulholland also told the jury that he “only envied those who were killed”. The words are not in the OCR of the scan read here, and the entry does not use them. The sentence it does use, “If there is an error of human judgment, I was the human”, is on page 378 of the second volume, at the end of an answer about whether he had been letting up.

Sources

• Transcript of Testimony and Verdict of the Coroner’s Jury in the Inquest over Victims of the St. Francis Dam Disaster, Los Angeles County, 21 March to 10 April 1928, two volumes, 825 pages in the scan posted by SCVHistory.com from Ann Stansell’s copy: Mulholland at vol. 1, p. 14, and vol. 2, pp. 373, 582 and 620; del Valle at p. 614. The OCR of the typescript is rough; the quotations are those it carries legibly, and the session dates legible in it are 21 March, 4 April and 10 April. scvhistory.com, transcript, the verdict
• Engineering News-Record, 29 March 1928, pp. 527–528 (the jury’s composition, the first days, and Mulholland’s words to the Evening Express); 10 May 1928, pp. 733–736 (the verdict in full). 29 March, 10 May
• J. David Rogers, “Who Designed the Ill-Fated St. Francis Dam?” World Environmental and Water Resources Congress 2017, American Society of Civil Engineers, pp. 379–393: the jurors’ names and the “only envied” remark. Copyrighted; quoted briefly. scvhistory.com
• The New York Times, 22 March 1928: the first day’s testimony, with the report that he wept. archive.org