Water king

The disgraceful end of California's water king

William Mulholland promised to bring water to LA. Today his legacy is one of success and death.

By Phil Faroudja

Mulholland Drive sits high atop the Santa Monica Mountains, overlooking the vast expanse of the Los Angeles Basin. If you’ve ever been there, the view is especially spectacular at night: With the whole city beneath, a thousand lights glitter in the darkness like jewels.

The roadway is named after William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant engineer who, almost by accident, became one of LA’s most important figures — before becoming a cautionary tale.

Mulholland’s great achievement came when Southern California needed him the most. He is LA’s first water king, the man who brought much-needed Sierra snowmelt to the city by completing the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Finished in 1913, the 233-mile-long aqueduct runs from the Owens Valley in eastern California to the San Fernando Valley and on to countless homes and businesses. Because of Los Angeles’ semiarid Mediterranean climate, Mulholland’s massive public works project enabled dramatic population growth, which in turn fueled the explosive development of the motion picture industry — and LA’s many grass-covered properties.

Today the aqueduct is as beloved and relied upon as it is embattled, part of a bitter conversation about who controls water and land in an increasingly volatile American West. But the aqueduct that made Mulholland was not his undoing; it was his decision to turn off the flow of water that would cost hundreds of lives and lead to his exiting in disgrace from the public eye.

A man for the moment

Born in Belfast, Ireland (now Northern Ireland), in 1855, William Mulholland had an adventurous personality, according to the biography “Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster” by Norris Hundley Jr. and Donald C. Jackson.

Escaping unhappy family circumstances, at 15 he joined the British Merchant Navy and sailed for four years. Following that, he tried his luck in America, working odd jobs in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Once, he nearly lost a leg in a logging accident.

Arriving in Los Angeles, Mulholland found opportunities scarce. He parlayed a job as a ditch digger into a role with the city’s burgeoning Water Department, where he attained a steady income and eventually rose to superintendent. He married and became a U.S. citizen. His educational background was limited, so on his own, he studied civil engineering, geology and hydraulics. Eventually, the movement and collection of water, pulled down from the steepest slopes in California, became his life.

By 1900, Mulholland and former co-worker and then-LA mayor Frederick Eaton were convinced the city was poised for enormous growth. Local officials and the general public shared this estimation. Los Angeles had long lagged behind San Francisco in population, but in 1890 it counted 50,000 residents, and by 1900 had doubled that to at least 100,000.

The rapid expansion was anything but smooth. Issues included labor uprisings, disagreements over where to place a new harbor, land booms and busts, unsightly oil derricks populating the landscape and a growing lack of reliable, usable water. Of these, the water shortage was the most significant.

Mulholland and Eaton believed the solution was to divert water from the Owens River near the eastern Sierra and to bring it south. City government and the citizenry agreed, and bonds were passed providing funding. 

Los Angeles finally had a solution to its water woes. There was just one problem: The water belonged to someone else.

The river drained into Owens Valley, which resembled a small Switzerland at the time in its landscape. Rather than freely give away their water to a boomtown hundreds of miles to the south, farmers there leaned on previous federal support for a grandiose plan to irrigate crops and build a hydroelectric plant, and they appealed to Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt to safeguard the water for local use.

In a stunning rebuke, Roosevelt decided in favor of Los Angeles. “It is a hundred or a thousandfold more important to the State and more valuable to the people as a whole,” he wrote, “if used by the city than if used by the people of Owens Valley.”

While the legal process played out, Los Angeles secretly purchased land and water rights along the Owens River anyway, and soon construction of the aqueduct began on its collection of private land. Built in less than six years, and powered solely by gravity, the Los Angeles Aqueduct proved to be a great engineering feat comparable to the Panama Canal.

The aqueduct was not only of record length, but had been constructed on difficult terrain. It went up nearly vertical walls of canyons, across their horizontal surfaces, and down. It traveled over and tunneled beneath chains of mountains. Miles of it passed through the Mojave Desert, open and baking in the scorching heat, before reaching greater Los Angeles.

On Nov. 5, 1913, the aqueduct was completed and water arrived in the San Fernando Valley. A ceremony to mark the occasion drew some 40,000 people, many with a tin cup to take a drink. Mulholland was called on to speak.

“There it is,” he famously proclaimed. “Take it!”

Take it they did. Many Southern California industries flourished soon after the aqueduct was finished. By the mid-1920s, movies made in Hollywood were dominating the silver screen, while simultaneously the LA aircraft industry seized the skies and the region’s vast oil reserves fueled the cars on the road. The real estate market was red-hot.

The public appreciated what Mulholland had accomplished, and he became a celebrity. Called “the Chief,” he received an honorary Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. At one point there was serious talk of Mulholland running for mayor.

Back in Owens Valley, people resented the appropriation of the river by a distant metropolis. The valley dried up, and agriculture withered. The situation became ugly, with farmers redirecting the water and dynamiting the aqueduct a number of times. Hundreds of armed guards were brought in just to protect the flow.

Mulholland’s deadly reversal of fortune

Ironically, despite the impressive growth, it turned out that the Los Angeles Aqueduct provided far more water than was needed. The surplus was diverted to surrounding communities and to control the excess, numerous reservoirs and dams were built outside the city.

Mulholland himself, ever the civil engineer, designed the St. Francis Dam, 15 miles north of Los Angeles proper, to help hold water inside a large reservoir. Crucially — and fatally — there were several errors in his construction.

Close to midnight on March 12, 1928, after the reservoir had recently been filled to the limit, the dam collapsed. The left and right sides melted away, leaving only the middle standing. An enormous wave a mile wide traveling at 18 miles an hour headed west to the sea, demolishing everything before it.

The dam keeper and his son, who lived in a small cottage a quarter of a mile away, were killed instantly. Their bodies were never found. A group of 140 Edison company workers camped nearby were hit, and about half perished. Power lines to Los Angeles were cut, and for a brief time, the city could only manage a morose twinkle as the lights fluttered on and off.

Word spread and police hurried to warn residents, but not everyone escaped. Five and a half hours later, the flood emptied bodies and debris into the Pacific Ocean. Over 400 people had died. 

Mulholland’s dam failure was one of the worst man-made disasters in U.S. history. In the aftermath, plans for new regional reservoirs were abruptly canceled. People eyed the Los Angeles Aqueduct skeptically. They wondered, would it also come apart? The St. Francis Dam disaster changed how California manages its water. The state began earnest regulation efforts and, going forward, required all municipal civil engineers to be licensed and all projects to be approved by the government.

William Mulholland on the witness stand at the coroner’s inquest over the bodies of people who lost their lives in the St. Francis Dam Disaster. Mulholland said, “I envy the dead.” March 26, 1928.

William Mulholland on the witness stand at the coroner’s inquest over the bodies of people who lost their lives in the St. Francis Dam Disaster. Mulholland said, “I envy the dead.” March 26, 1928.

An inquiry concluded the cause was flawed engineering. Mulholland’s towering reputation was ruined, and he retired, disgraced.

Mulholland’s life was ultimately one of contradiction: He was responsible for one of the greatest American engineering achievements, and additionally for one of the biggest catastrophes. But water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct is still used by millions today, and the city continues to grow.