I love public television. Still, it's not known as an outlet for thrill seekers. It seldom provides its viewers with an adrenaline rush. Nonetheless, PBS does stage memorable television events, and one of them was the documentary, Cadillac Desert, accompanied by Marc Reisner's best-selling book of the same name.
Reisner chronicles in mostly-riveting, though sometimes mind-numbing, detail the great Westward Migration in America and its dependence on a dwindling, non-renewable water supply. The intrigue and politics of water, says Reisner, have been the driving force in shaping the American West, and in the end there simply will not be enough of it. When it runs out, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed inevitably by a great Eastward Migration.
Readers of Cadillac Desert will remember one of the most notorious events in California History, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, which occurred eighty years ago this week. Early Twentiety-Century celebrity, Los Angeles water engineer William Mulholland (as in Mulholland Drive) had just watched a proposal to strip yet more water from the Owens Valley go sour. He desperately needed to find a way to satisfy LA's growing water addiction, and in the end he decided to expand the size of an already-large dam in the nearby San Francisquito Canyon. This proved to be a lousy idea.
A short excerpt from Reisner:
The initial surge of water was two hundred feet high, and could have toppled nearly anything in its path—thousand-ton blocks of concrete rode the crest like rafts. Seventy-five families were living in San Francisquito Canyon immediately below the dam. Only one of their members, who managed to claw his way up the canyon wall just before the first wave hit, survived. Ten miles below, the village of Castaic Junction stood where the narrow canyon opened into the broader and flatter Santa Cara Valley. When the surge engulfed the town, it was still seventy-eight feet high. Days later, bodies and bits of Castaic Junction showed up on the beaches near San Diego.
Of course, this was only the first bit of the journey. The water followed roughly the route of present-day Route 126 until it reached the Pacific Ocean, taking a toll of 600 lives, to say nothing of William Mulholland's career. My friend and colleague at the Ventura County Star has the story of the anniversary. He interviewed survivors of the tragedy and also produced this video:
The Star also has an interesting animated recreation of the event, which is worth checking out. It comes complete with an ominous soundtrack reminiscent of a "B" horror-flick.
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