The entry and the companion piece “On the stand” follow Mulholland through the coroner’s inquest. Some seventy other witnesses sat in the same chair between 21 March and 10 April 1928. This piece gives the ones the entry leans on, in the order the jury heard them, from the transcript’s rough OCR and, where its pages are illegible, from J. David Rogers’s reading of the Huntington Library’s copy.

The assistant

Harvey Van Norman followed Mulholland on the first day. He had gone with him to the site “once or twice before it was decided to locate it there”, and had been away building the city’s outfall sewer while the dam was poured, coming back in August 1926 to find it thirty feet from its top. On the Monday: “Everything was, as far as I could see, as secure as it ever had been. There was some seepage coming from both ends of the dam, some coming from under the very base of the dam. The water in every case was crystal clear, no indication of any erosion, and there was nothing that would alarm, or, at least, did not alarm me to any extent at all. I left there with perfect confidence that the dam was perfectly all right.” They had left at about twelve, found the cafeteria in their building closed, and eaten “in a little restaurant on Second Street”. Of the keeper: “Tony is a man that I have a great deal of confidence in. He worked for me nearly fifteen years.” Would he have slept in the canyon that night? “Absolutely, I wouldn’t have had any apprehension at all. If I had any idea, the remotest idea that there was danger of that dam going out, I would have been the first one, at least, I would have spoken to Mr. Mulholland.” Where had the little stream of clear water come from? “No man could tell that. It came out of the reservoir, that was obvious.” Was the design proper? “I do.” And later, to a juror who suggested the dam could have been made safe: “I maintain it was safe.”

The builders

Stanley Dunham, the superintendent who built it, was asked what tests were made of the foundation before the dam was begun. “None made at all.” He had dug a trench to bedrock across the stream, put in a tunnel of thirty feet on the east side “to see that the rock was the same then, inside, as it was on the outside”, bored holes in the stream bed that were piped together to drain it, and poured. He was not a geologist: “I am calling it shale, what I call shale.”

William Lindsey, the general foreman, described the test holes on the west hill, “four or five, not exactly certain, probably a hundred and fifty feet apart”, twelve to sixteen feet deep, and the trench along the west abutment that he and his men had dug with picks and gads, “sunk into the hill four feet”. Why had they stopped at four feet? “Didn’t want to shoot it, shake up the rocks.” Would it have been necessary to blast to go deeper? “Certainly would.”

The design was put to the men who had drawn it. Edgar Bayley had designed the Hollywood dam, from the textbooks of Morrison and Brodie and of Wegmann, with a coefficient of friction between concrete and rock of two-thirds, taken for sandstone; he had not designed the St Francis Dam, he said, only made “the cross sectional transfer of the Hollywood Dam”. W. W. Hurlbut, the senior office engineer, was asked who had designed it. “The St. Francis Dam was designed under the instructions of the Chief Engineer and based on studies which were made for a gravity type dam, which was the Hollywood Dam.” Did he design it? “I did not.” Did Mr. Mulholland? “It was designed under his instructions.” When they wanted the St Francis Dam, Dennison asked, did they get out the old drawings of the Hollywood dam and revamp them? “They got out the computations and the studies on the Hollywood Dam, and the matter was gone into with Mr. Mulholland and others at that time.” There were, Hurlbut said, “no changes in the design to fit the different conditions”. When a juror asked whether the coefficient of friction used had varied, Hurlbut answered that it had, “depending upon the depth of the column of water”, as shown by the design “from thirty-four one hundredths to sixty-three and one half”. These exchanges are known mainly as Rogers transcribed them in 2017; the pages are among the least legible in the scan.

The rancher

Chester Smith, a rancher three or four miles below the dam, told the jury about the Saturday. He had stopped his car to look at “considerable water coming out on the west bank” and called down to the keeper’s assistant, Jack Ely, “in a joshing way”: “what are you sons of guns going to do here, going to flood us out down below?” Ely had answered “in the same way”: “We expect this dam to go out any minute.” “I know he didn’t mean it,” Smith said, “but I kind of talked a little serious to him. I said, ‘Jack, I believe you had better turn some of that water out, it don’t look good to me.’” On the Monday he drove cattle up past the dam and back and “still saw a big leak on the west side”. “I was a little suspicious, to tell you the truth, and left my door open.” He slept in the barn. “I ran when I heard that noise, and the dog awakened me; I could hear it coming, hear the trees breaking, and could hear a big pole snapping, could hear the wires on the electric poles going. I knew what was coming, because I had been in a flood once before.” He ran a hundred and fifty feet to the house where Hugh Nichols and his wife slept and shouted “The dam is broke”, and the three of them ran a hundred and fifty feet to the hill “and as we ran up the hill, the water was right behind us”. People had asked him why he had not run to warn the others. “It was impossible.” The family that had just moved onto his ranch to work for him was gone, “and I feel as bad about it as anybody, to feel that they moved up there”.

Nichols, who had seen the leak with Smith, said only that he “didn’t think the dam ought to be that full, leaking a little”. David Matthews, a labourer at Power House No. 2, said that on the Saturday he and his foreman, Harry Berry, had stood on the east end of the dam for ten or fifteen minutes “talking about the condition of the leak there”, and that “we thought it looked bad, that hill was all soaked, didn’t realize at that time that the dam was unsafe”. On the Monday afternoon Berry had taken him aside while they were putting stop logs into the gates at the head of the canal. “Dave, I will tell you something, the dam is not safe,” Berry said, by Matthews’s account; “We got orders to put all the logs in.” Berry told him not to tell anyone in camp. Driving home, Matthews met his brother coming up the canyon with his family and, weeping on the stand, told the jury that he had warned him “for God’s sake to move his family out”. The brother said he would move them the next day. Berry, his wife and the brother’s family were in the canyon that night.

The road

The last witnesses to the dam itself were the people who had driven past it. Katherine Spann, a nurse at the construction camp at Power House No. 1, had gone down the canyon with Elmer Steen between seven and half past, taken Mrs Berry to Newhall and back, and left the Berrys’ house when Steen’s watch said nineteen minutes past eleven, “plenty of time for coffee”. They passed the dam not more than five minutes later. Had she noticed any unusual amount of water in the canal? “No, nothing at all.” Had she heard anything? “Nothing. I said to Mr. Steen, ‘It is pretty quiet tonight, terribly quiet.’” The dam was blacked out; the power house’s lights were all lit, and men were coming off shift. They reached Power Plant No. 1 and looked at the clock: ten past twelve. Steen, who passed the canal every day, said the same: no unusual water, “nothing unusual at all”.

Ace Hopewell, a carpenter, left Newhall at about half past ten on a motorcycle, stopped for coffee at Saugus, and went on up the canyon. He noticed no water on the road and nothing in the canal. He passed “right at the east end of the dam”, on the road along the east side, with no light but his headlight: “Extremely dark.” About a mile and a half beyond it, “between half past eleven and twelve”, he heard “a rumbling noise”, stopped, got off, and smoked a cigarette, with the engine running, listening to what he took for a landslide behind him. Then he went on to Power House No. 1. Henry Silvey, the operator there, had driven past the dam at about nine, with his wife and children and a car fifty or seventy-five feet behind him whose lights fell on the ditch; he saw nothing, and by Rogers’s reading of his testimony he spoke to the operator at Power House No. 2 at 11.47 and found everything normal. Dean Keagy, a warehouseman, had passed at about half past eleven and seen lights in the canyon bottom below the dam, which he took for a camp. His page in the transcript is illegible in the scan; his words are known from Charles Outland’s history and from Rogers.

The commissioner

Reginaldo F. del Valle, an attorney, had been president of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners for twenty years. What had the board done about the site and the plans? After the permit from the government, “this matter has been left entirely in the hands of Mr. Mulholland, to submit to the board such matters as he desired from time to time”. Had any member of the board since the project began been an engineer? “None at all.” Had the board ever told him to bring in outside geologists or engineers? Mulholland had built the aqueduct and nineteen dams for the department, “and during that whole time, the board has found that he has used the proper judgment, has been competent, efficient in every manner, and therefore the matter of detail as to whom he should consult has been left entirely to his judgment, because the board has had the utmost confidence, and has now, in his ability as an engineer”. Did the board have the means to employ geologists? “Yes sir.” But none were employed? “If anything of that kind was necessary, we left that entirely to Mr. Mulholland.” He added that until then “the State of California didn’t even consider the examination of reservoirs for that purpose”. Was this Mulholland’s first mistake? “This is the first accident that occurred to any of these institutions with which he has been connected.” The board’s members, he said, “are men connected with financial interests of this city, and therefore have in no wise been penurious”.

The verdict

On 12 April the jury found that Julia Rising “came to her death on the 13th day of March, 1928, by drowning and other injuries, caused by the failure and destruction of the St. Francis Dam”, and that her death was accidental. Its conclusions, which Engineering News-Record printed in full on 10 May, are in the entry and in “Six reports”. On the question the jury had been chosen to answer, it wrote that the chief engineer and his principal assistants “had had limited experience in the building of large masonry or concrete dams prior to the building of the St. Francis dam. Earth-fill and rock-fill dams are built wholly or in part on unconsolidated or yielding foundations, while masonry or concrete dams must have hard, impervious, unyielding foundations.” The personnel of the bureau and of the commissioners “appears to have had an unusual degree of confidence in the chief engineer and relied entirely upon his ability, experience and infallibility in matters of engineering judgment”. And: “The only reasonable explanation is that those in charge were completely deceived as to the true conditions and acted through ignorance and not from intent to omit any precaution from any motive.” It found no criminal act or intent, and recommended that there be no prosecution.

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: Van Norman (vol. 1, p. 87), Dunham (p. 38), Chester Smith (pp. 177 and 185), Hugh Nichols (p. 183), David Matthews (p. 188), Lindsey (vol. 2, p. 361), Hurlbut (p. 483), Keagy (p. 424), Spann (p. 432), del Valle (p. 614), Hopewell (p. 641), Steen (p. 646), Silvey (p. 667). The OCR is rough; the quotations are those it carries legibly. scvhistory.com, transcript, the verdict
• Engineering News-Record, 10 May 1928, pp. 733–736: the jury’s verdict in full. archive.org
• J. David Rogers, “Who Designed the Ill-Fated St. Francis Dam?” World Environmental and Water Resources Congress 2017, pp. 379–393: Hurlbut’s and Bayley’s testimony on the design, transcribed from the Huntington Library’s copy. Copyrighted; quoted briefly. scvhistory.com
• J. David Rogers, “A Man, A Dam and A Disaster: Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam,” Ventura County Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 40, nos. 3–4, 1995: the road witnesses, Keagy’s lights and Silvey’s call, with Outland’s page references. Copyrighted; quoted briefly. archive.org