Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster

Minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, sending more than 12 billion gallons of water surging through Southern California's Santa Clara Valley and killing some 400 people. This tragic failure is widely recognized as the greatest civil engineering disaster in twentieth-century American history. Extensively illustrated and carefully researched, Heavy Ground provides a compelling an account of how the St. Francis Dam came to be built, its relationship to the Los Angeles Aqueduct (which is famed for bringing water from the rural Owens Valley to the growing urban enclave in Southern California), the reasons for its collapse, the terror and heartbreak brought by the flood to the people of the Santa Clara Valley (including the communities of Saugus, Piru, Fillmore, and Santa Paula), efforts to restore the homes and landscape ravaged by the flood and to compensate victims for their losses, the political factors influencing investigations of the failure, the relationship of these investigations to the impending Congressional passage of the Boulder Canyon Project Act (which authorized what became known as Hoover Dam), and the effect of the disaster on subsequent dam safety regulation in California. Underlying all is a consideration of how the dam-and the disaster- was inextricably intertwined with the life and career of William Mulholland, one of the most renowned engineers in the American West who was also responsible for the design and construction of the ill-fated dam.