Re: Questions for Curious
Posted by Curious on June 18, 2004 at 14:09:26:
In Reply to: Questions for Curious posted by Zardoz on June 17, 2004 at 14:09:42:
I believe there was a study in 1993 that looked at the eastern portion of the damn and the hill on which it was anchored. It was the hill that failed so to speak and then the damn. The damn was built on an ancient landslide and this was not stable. There is also speculation that dynamiting that was being done in that area to build a road had loosened the ancient landslide. Another factor may have been the raising of the damn’s height after construction had been started, so that the dam’s reservoir would contain more water. This was done without thickening the damn. It is likely that is was a combination of these factors that caused the failure and the severity of the failure.
In the 1920s the knowledge of the instability of the terrain on the eastern side of the dam was unknown and could not be known with the technology available at the time. The construction of the damn was done in accordance with what were then accepted practices. Hindsight calls these practices into question and dam construction techniques were changed accordingly as a result.
The day of the dam failure the reservoir was in the long process of being filled to its full capacity for the first time. Cracks did appear and some leaked. Similar cracks had appeared in other dams and in the St. Francis Dam all during the filling process. Mulholland did visit the dam to look at new cracks and they appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary to him. Again, the technology of the time was based entirely on visual inspection. Visually, the dam looked ordinary.
Obviously the damn was not ordinary nor was March 12, 1928 an ordinary day.
It is so easy to look back on events and see where had different choices been made, the outcome would have been better and then assign culpability. However, with the events taken in context and in order, how many people at the time would have made other choices?
I understand you opinion that it was ego that was a contributing factor and perhaps it was. To undertake the project Mulholland did one would need a well inflated ego! However, Mulholland did not set out on the morning on March 12, 1928 to kill hundreds of people. A series of errors made over a number of years coupled with thousands of years of geology created a situation that resulted in tragedy. Again, basically my point from my previous posts, that things are more complicated than one man.
It is all the events and factors that occurred in San Francisquito Canyon that make the history so fascinating. When you hike around on the pieces of the dam and consider all that went on there it is sad but so interesting. It is one of those spots where everything came together and a huge event occurred.