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At two-and-a-half minutes before midnight

on the 12th of March 1928,

the lights in Los Angeles flickered.

William Mulholland was asleep
at his home near Windsor Square.

He didn't notice.

Mulholland runs an agency

that is in charge of providing water

for Los Angeles.

He's a civil servant.

Nonetheless, he's
extraordinarily powerful,

and he knows it.

Mulholland is the man who brought

water to the city of Los Angeles.

With the aqueduct,

with the dams,

he forges Los Angeles into a major city.

Meanwhile, in a
canyon 40 miles northwest of the city,

Ace Hopewell pulled his motorcycle

to the side of the road.

He passed the St. Francis Dam
about a mile back,

Mulholland's most recent creation:

a wall of concrete 20 stories high

holding back 12 billion gallons of water.

As he lit a cigarette,

Hopewell heard a sound in the distance.

The St. Francis Dam
was collapsing.

It's 54 miles to the ocean.

As many as 10,000 people

are downstream from this.

They could actually feel the vibration

and they could hear it coming.

It felt like an earthquake.

They saw their neighbors running out.

And then they realized.

But by that time,
the water was just upon them.

Most of the people who were killed

probably never knew what
was happening to them.

That wall of water carried bodies

out to the Pacific Ocean.

It was one of the
worst civil engineering disasters

in American history,

rooted in a national drive

to harness nature and remake the West.

The question is not whether

water should have been brought
to Los Angeles,

but rather how it was done.

Because the consequences
are so devastating.

When infrastructure fails,

engineers use the disaster
to learn from and rebuild.

But the failure of the
St. Francis Dam is as much

a social-political story as it is

an engineering story.

And when there's a social disaster,

we need to think about, where
did we go wrong as a society?

When I was a young boy,

my parents would always warn me
not to go to the river.

They would tell the story of La Llorona,

the woman that would be crying
along the riverbed,

searching for her children.

There's definitely a haunting
of the river even to this day.

And I never understood until I
was much older

why there were ghosts along the
Santa Clara River.

The St. Francis Dam disaster

began in a flush of hope.

On a perfect November morning in 1913,

40,000 Angelenos gathered at a
new landmark called the Cascades

to inaugurate one of the wonders
of the modern world.

The Los Angeles Aqueduct
was a perfect emblem

for the city of tomorrow:

more than 200 miles of pipes and canals

carrying enough water for
two-and-a-half million people,

ten times the current population,

from the Sierra Nevada Mountains
to the outskirts of the city.

The aqueduct
does hail a new beginning for Los Angeles.

It very much follows on the idea
of Manifest Destiny,

but now it's not just about land.

It's about controlling the resources

to make the American West
the kind of civilization

they want it to be, the kind of
place that they want it to be.

The "Los Angeles Times" proclaimed,

"A mighty river has been brought out

from the mountain wilderness, an
inexhaustible supply of water."

And there was more.

They realized that they could
use this flow

to turn generators and generate
90% of the electricity

that was needed by Los Angeles.

With ample water and clean power,

L.A. would lead the way
to a better future,

far from the crowded cities of the East.

"No black pillars of smoke

shall blind the sun,"
the "L.A. Times" promised,

"no army of grimy workers

"shall feed the red-mouthed furnaces,

"for the river, bound with hoops of steel,

shall generate the power
for numberless industries."

"We will be a modern city.

"We're not going to be like
those older places

"that have these older social problems.

We can remake ourselves
in this new way."

Having, quote-unquote,
"ended the frontier era,"

the West is now going to be

won or lost through its cities.

The rise of faith in the city,
it's very optimistic.

The mastermind behind the aqueduct

was the head of the Los Angeles Bureau

of Water Works and Supply,

an Irish immigrant who never
finished grade school.

"Well, I went to school in
Ireland when I was a boy,"

William Mulholland told a reporter,

"learned the three Rs
and the Ten Commandments...

"or most of them... made a
pilgrimage to the Blarney Stone,

received my father's blessing,
and here I am."

He starts out

as a ditch digger.

I mean, you can't start out any lower,

you know, than that.

But that's what made him such
a good field general.

He understands the working man

and how to marshal their efforts.

That was what he lived for.

Angelenos really loved him

because he was a working-class
immigrant who had made good.

He was the hearty Irishman,

the man of the people.

But the settlers
in the Owens River Valley,

the source of L.A.'s water,

saw William Mulholland very differently.

As far as they were concerned,
he was taking their river,

leaving farms and towns
to wither on the vine.

They had been kept in the dark
about the aqueduct

as the city quietly bought
up their land and water rights.

The Owens Valley
was a rural, high-desert community

that had begun settled by
Euro Americans in the 1860s.

Their fortunes were tied
to the Owens River.

The water wasn't stolen,

but it was not acquired all
in the up-and-up.

They certainly didn't tell
them that their plan really

was to run the water down to Los Angeles.

The anger in the Owens Valley

would haunt Mulholland to his grave,

but for most Angelenos,
any qualms about the project

were eclipsed by its
breathtaking scale and ambition.

It is a gargantuan construction project:

placing metal aqueduct structures

in and around valleys,

arroyos, sheer mountains,

long, flat, dry expanses

of the California landscape.

It's astonishing.

To think that you could bring that water

over 200 miles, that's just
extraordinary at the time.

It would be a huge project today.

On that November day in 1913,

when Angelenos gathered at the Cascades

to celebrate the opening of the aqueduct,

they were captivated by
the city's glittering future.

Shortly after 1:00 p.m.,

Owens River water
was released down the Cascades

for the first time.

The people just rushed toward the water.

They had brought tin cups to dip

into the water as it was coming down,

to drink the first water
from this man-made river.

As the crowd
rushed to marvel at their new river,

Mulholland perfectly captured the moment.

"There it is," he shouted from the stage.

"Take it."

The aqueduct was a game changer.

It made Los Angeles

the fastest-growing city in the
United States.

The aqueduct teaches Los Angeles that

it can do bold and amazing things.

Suburbs are springing up all over,

and migrants are pouring into Los Angeles.

It was a moment of great excitement.

That's not to say this works for everybody

by any stretch of the imagination.

There's racial segregation
in law and in practice.

There's violence meted out to non-whites.

So, it's not a alchemy

of fulfillment and happiness
that spreads to everybody.

But the mythic qualities of it
are palpable.

The dream was: come here,
perhaps start anew.

But as Los Angeles boomed,

Southern California was drying up.

By the time the population
blew past the one million mark

in the early 1920s,
the aqueduct flow had been cut

almost in half by years of drought.

Just think about it:
they were looking out 50 years,

and they were out of water in ten.

Surprise, surprise.

That's what California is full of.

It's full of surprises.

What Mulholland created
was an illusion of abundance.

And so, the people of the city
of Los Angeles

keep using more water

instead of responding
to drought conditions.

There are lawns everywhere.

Spectacular flower gardens.

The amount of water poured
onto those lawns

is pretty astounding.

In order
to quench L.A.'s thirst,

the Bureau of Water went on
another buying spree

in the Owens Valley,

laying claim to most of the
remaining water

and further undermining
the region's economy.

There's a tremendous amount of anger

growing in the Owens Valley.

There's a sense that the community

is really being destroyed.

To see this distant city

turning into a glamorous metropolis...

...and using their water,

must have been incredibly frustrating.

Arrogance absolutely plays a big role.

There is a lot of resentment
that is driven by the decisions

and the attitudes of people
like Mulholland.

The farmers in the Owens River Valley

weren't perceived as equal citizens.

They are imperial subjects.

The anger only
deepened when it became clear

that much of the Owens River water

wasn't going to Los Angeles at all.

Even as the rest of Southern California

was drying up, the city was providing

vast amounts of water to farms

and orchards in the San Fernando Valley,

which belonged in large part
to a syndicate

of the most powerful men in the city.

Did the city really
need to provide landowners

in the San Fernando Valley
with that much water?

Well, it turns out that the
owner of the "Los Angeles Times"

and some other associates
have bought a lot of land there.

Those wealthy landowners made a killing.

It's very easy
to picture Mulholland as corrupt,

but he wasn't doing this because
he was getting paid off to do it

or he was making money off of it.

I think, for him,
it's really about his own vision

and his power and his ability

to remake nature.

I think that's what's driving him.

The threat of shortages

accelerated the next phase
in Mulholland's master plan.

In a dry year,

if there isn't a lot of snow
in the Sierra Nevada,

the aqueduct won't deliver
as much water to Los Angeles.

So they need storage,

big reservoir, so you could fill
it up in the wet years,

and in the dry years, it'll tide you over.

In the summer of 1922,

Mulholland decided to build seven new dams

near the southern end of the aqueduct,

including a pair of majestic
concrete structures

worthy of a great metropolis:

the Hollywood Dam, in the hills
overlooking Los Angeles,

and biggest of all,
the St. Francis Dam,

in a canyon 40 miles northwest
of the city.

The St. Francis
Dam and the Hollywood Dam

are similar structures;
they were both built

with the same design,

a tribute to engineering triumph
and the control of nature,

and it's impossible not to think

that he saw it as a tribute
to him, as well.

Plans were
drawn up in Mulholland's offices

in the fall of 1922.

20 years before, the city had required

that a group of experts review
his plans for the aqueduct.

But that was then.

This is that sense

that he had earned the right

to sort of do what he wanted to do.

This is the
second-largest storage reservoir

in Southern California.

It should have had peer review;

at least some people outside
his organization reviewing it

and looking at it.

But nobody's questioning him
by the time you get to 1922.

Nobody.

In April of 1924,

the first construction workers arrived

in the San Francisquito Canyon.

It had been 12 years
since Mulholland's crews

ran the southern end of
the aqueduct through here,

and three years

since they finished building
a generating station

called Powerhouse 2

about a mile downstream from the new dam.

The Powerhouse 2 workers
and their families

lived in wooden bungalows
clustered around the plant

at the bottom of the canyon.

Now their quiet little community

was overrun with men and machinery.

But just as the project was gearing up,

it suddenly took on a new urgency.

On the 21st of May 1924,

a massive explosion destroyed a section

of the aqueduct in Owens Valley.

The damage was repaired within a few days,

but as far as the activists
in the valley were concerned,

the fight was just getting started.

The aqueduct
was a disaster for Owens Valley.

The people who lived there
lost almost all of their water.

It became such a desolate place.

It was a complete undoing

of their livelihoods and their households

and their families.

To the city
and to Mulholland, this is terrorism.

You are destroying the water supply

for this major urban center.

Six months after the first attack,

over a hundred men seized

the aqueduct control gates in
Owens Valley,

opened up the valves,

and released the water
onto the parched soil.

They wouldn't restore
the aqueduct flow, they said,

until the city agreed to pay reparations

and limit any further expansion
of the project.

By noon the next day, hundreds
of men, women, and children

had joined the siege,

which had come to look more
like a huge barbecue.

Families came with picnics,

businesses up and down the
valley closed for the occasion,

and a group of musicians arrived,

courtesy of movie star Tom Mix,

who was shooting a Western nearby.

The siege lasted four days,

long enough to make news around the world.

To Mulholland's annoyance,

much of the coverage presented
the settlers' actions

as a noble struggle against the corruption

and power of Los Angeles.

It became known
in the press as "the Little Civil War."

And it was intense, and it was violent.

There are multiple layers of irony here.

When the settlers of the Owens Valley

came in the 1850s and '60s,

they displaced the Northern Paiute people,

the Native people
who lived in the Owens Valley.

Before contact,

the Paiutes' homeland had stretched across

30 million acres of the Western interior.

Although most preferred a
nomadic lifestyle,

one group settled in Owens Valley,

where the snowmelt coming off
the Sierra Nevada Mountains

provided a reliable source of water.

The Paiutes there,
they were building irrigation canals

going back to 1000 A.D.,

so they could take the runoff

from the back side of the Sierra Nevada

and they could grow different
types of indigenous crops.

Of course, during the conquest,

there's an influx of white
Americans to the West Coast.

For the Owens Valley Paiute,
in particular,

there's tension over kidnapping
of Paiute children

and other types of really
atrocious things,

and there's a series of wars.

In the long run, it's,
it's the Paiute who are removed

from their ancestral lands
as the settlers come there

and basically take over the
irrigation system

that the Paiutes had built
a thousand years before.

So what the settlers did to Native people,

the City of Los Angeles
is in a sense doing to them:

taking the water away.

The Los Angeles Water Bureau picked up

where the Paiute Wars left off,

insisting that any Paiutes
who remained in the valley

should be removed through a land swap

for humanitarian reasons.

"Some are living in dugouts
or crudely constructed shacks

that are a disgrace to American ideals,"

an internal report observed,
before coming to the point.

"Nearly all of them use
immense quantities of water."

Is it a morality tale?

It's always a morality tale.

But of course, it depends on whose morals

and whose perspective.

Dispossession is really woven into

the fabric of the American West.

It's the philosophy that

forms the entire foundation of
the settlement of the region.

By the fall of 1924,

the canyon was a hive of activity.

Trucks ferried sand and gravel

to a small concrete plant at
the downstream face of the dam.

A crane lifted the liquid concrete.

Workers directed it into position.

Over the next 16 months, that
same operation would be repeated

tens of thousands of times.

A gravity dam's a very simple concept.

It's a retaining wall that you're building

to have something of much
greater weight and stability

than the forces you're putting against it.

And this is water, this is concrete.

So a dam that has a triangular shape

should be able to hold back a
lake that's of infinite length.

As work proceeded on the dam,

Mulholland decided to make it taller

than originally planned.

Mulholland had made a promise

that he wanted enough storage

to contain one year's water
supply for Los Angeles.

Because the population was
increasing so much every year,

the demand was greater and greater.

And so Mulholland

increased the height of the dam ten feet

the first year that they were
in construction,

and then the second year, he did it again,

without increasing the base width.

What's important here is, okay,

you can raise the height of the dam.

But if you do this,

there's going to be more
pressure on the concrete,

and you better make sure that
it's thick enough

to withstand that.

In fact, Mulholland was distracted

by an even more ambitious enterprise.

The Boulder Dam project,

which becomes the Hoover Dam,

is an undertaking that
even dwarfs the aqueduct:

to take water from the
Colorado River, move it

to various places along
Southern California.

Mulholland is a consultant
to that project.

It feeds into his vision of what

he thinks Southern California can become.

Even as the biggest dam he'd ever built

was rising in the San Francisquito Canyon,

Mulholland was on the road
for weeks at a time,

mapping out routes for
a Colorado River aqueduct

and lobbying in Sacramento and Washington.

All the while,
behind the St. Francis Dam,

the water was rising,
the pressure building.

When it's completed in the spring of 1926,

there's almost no public notice of it.

There are a number of dynamite attacks

that take place along the aqueduct.

I think they don't want
to draw attention to it.

The official
reticence did nothing to pacify

the settlers in the Owens Valley.

On May 27, 1927, an explosion

ripped out one of the largest
siphons in the aqueduct.

A few nights later,

another 60-foot section was destroyed.

By the end of June, there had been

three more attacks on the aqueduct,

and the city was alive
with rumors of a plot

to bomb the St. Francis Dam.

The authorities had yet
to make a single arrest.

No one in the valley was talking.

Hundreds of armed guards were sent in.

To locals, they were an occupying army.

Despite the worries about sabotage,

communities that lay
in the potential flood path

were never consulted about the dam.

The Santa Clara River Valley
stretched 50 miles

from the San Francisquito
Canyon to the Pacific Ocean,

a patchwork of citrus farms and oil wells

that was a magnet for
newcomers seeking work.

There were some groups
that had been there for generations,

back from the Spanish era

and the Mexican period
of the 19th century.

But many were starting to arrive, really,

in the early 1900s,

and especially during
the Mexican Revolution,

like my grandfather.

Half the people
in Santa Paula were of Mexican descent,

most of them recent arrivals
working in the citrus industry.

My great-aunt and her husband

were hardworking people.

Poor.

So they had to follow the crops.

Soledad, being the oldest child,

stayed behind in camp
taking care of her siblings.

When they would come home,
they lived in Santa Paula.

And it was very close to the river bottom.

Not a lot of people knew

of the St. Francis Dam.

Even the ranchers who owned
a lot of the orchards,

they didn't even know
the dam was being built

until the cement was being poured.

You can imagine that the
Mexican community had no idea.

That's what's so weird.

I mean, it's this major structure.

And it's just fascinating
that there's so many people

who don't really have any
sense that it's there.

Mulholland gets a call,

I think it was a Monday,

from Tony Harnischfeger,
who's his dam keeper.

Harnischfeger was
highly attuned to the dam's condition.

He and his family lived in the shadow

of the enormous structure.

Over the last year,
Harnischfeger had watched

as a series of cracks appeared in the dam.

Those cracks went
all the way through the dam.

There were at least four of them.

And Mulholland plugged all of the cracks

with oakum on the downstream face.

That was the absolute
worst thing you could do,

because now you're taking that
hydraulic pressure

and you're putting it on
the interior of the dam.

Harnischfeger was on edge.

The reservoir had been filled to capacity

for the first time five days before.

Water was leaking under
the dam's west side.

Mulholland goes out there

right away to take a look at it.

And what he told
Harnischfeger was, you know,

"There's no active erosion

"occurring of the dam foundation.

This is a lot about nothing."

Mulholland was back at the office

in time for a late lunch.

But with every passing minute,

the internal stresses on
the dam were multiplying.

At around 11:20 p.m.,

the structure finally began to give way.

A huge crack opened up
on its upstream side.

This is where that extra height

really makes a difference.

It's kind of like, you know,

straws on a camel's back.

This dam did not have the capacity

to stop the loads
that were being put on it.

The dam was actually tilting
one half of a degree.

Already the St.
Francis Dam was fractured by cracks,

and its central section
was tilting forward.

Then another defect

in Mulholland's design came into play.

What about water that seeps under the base

of the dam and then begins
to push up at the bottom,

what was termed uplift?

The dam had sort of pushed
up off of its foundation.

Like most modern dams,

the St. Francis included
relief wells to prevent uplift,

but only in its center section.

The wings of the dam were
beginning to slip away.

Around 11:30 p.m.,
a massive chunk of the dam,

severed by cracks and weakened
by uplift, blew out.

Intensely pressurized water began

jetting through the resulting gap.

The entire east wing was
on the verge of collapse.

Over time, water
from the reservoir had begun

to saturate the east abutment,

which was made up
of this geological formation

called schist,

and it's layers of slate
literally stacked on each other.

If it begins to be on an angle,
as the hillside was,

and water gets in between
these slate-like layers,

it slides like a deck of cards.

At two-and-a-half minutes before midnight,

the entire hillside under the east wing

collapsed into the dam.

The dam was sliding on its base.

And the west side crumbled down.

And it collapses.

Tony Harnischfeger probably saw it happen.

Ace Hopewell, smoking a cigarette

a mile up the road,
heard it in the distance.

The landslide severed the wires

carrying power to Los Angeles.

The lights in the city flickered.

This huge flow,

close to a million cubic feet per second,

just rushes down the canyon.

For Harnischfeger and his family,

"Oh, my God!"

There's no way you're going
to withstand that.

The sound of the collapsing dam

took a little less
than seven seconds to reach

the cluster of cabins around
Powerhouse Number 2,

where it woke Lillian Curtis.

She looked out to see

"a misty haze hanging
over everything."

Suddenly, Curtis grabbed her
husband and screamed,

"The dam has broke!"

It's a colossal
force coming down the canyon,

not like anything your senses
would ever have understood.

Curtis scrambled up the side of the canyon

with her three-year-old son,
while her husband

went back to fetch the girls.

That people had enough time

to try to save their families

and then to fail is,

is a horrifying idea.

40 minutes after the collapse,

the deluge burst out of
the canyon and turned into

the valley of the Santa Clara River,

where 140 Edison Company workers

were sleeping at an encampment.

"The confusion," one man remembered,

"was indescribable."

Fewer than half of them
would see the sun rise.

Most of the people who were killed

probably never knew what
was happening to them.

They just knew they were drowning.

In Santa Paula, ten-year-old

Soledad Luna heard shouting outside.

Two motorcycle policemen were going around

yelling, "Agua, agua!"

My great-grandfather thought it was crazy.

"It hasn't been raining...
what water is he talking about?"

So my family didn't really
pay much attention

until other neighbors started running.

Precious minutes ticked by

as Soledad's father
and her Uncle Sisto packed

the family's possessions before finally

gathering her young cousins.

Sisto got his children,

put the four oldest
in the flatbed of the truck,

and his wife was sitting
in the cab of the truck

holding their infant when the water hit.

As the truck toppled over,
they could see the little

children's arms flailing in the water,

trying to grasp, and crying out.

With nowhere to go,

Soledad's mother grabbed her four children

and huddled them on the bed.

The first impact tore
their flimsy house apart.

Miraculously, Soledad, her mother,

and her three siblings were carried away

on the crest of the flood,
their bed a life raft.

But Soledad's luck seemed
to run out when her hair

became entangled in
the branches of a tree.

Soledad watched her mother and siblings

float away into the darkness.

Soledad screamed,

and her mother tried
to grab her and couldn't.

She couldn't see.

It was, it was dark.

But she could hear animals drowning,

people screaming.

And that was so terrifying to her.

As the flood carried
Soledad's mother downstream,

it spread across the landscape until

the leading edge was
almost two miles wide.

Even so, it still had power enough

to demolish railroad and highway bridges.

Along the way, it had
picked up all the debris

of the economy of the
Santa Clara River Valley.

Orchard trees, cattle.

And as you get to the ocean,

oil from oil drilling.

So it's this mix of sludge

and rocks and parts of steel bridges

and bodies and animals
in a kind of an oil slick.

At 5:25 in the morning,

at the mouth of the Santa Clara River,

the floodwaters finally
washed into the sea.

The next day was gloomy,

overcast.

There was no color at all that morning.

My grandfather walked around.

He remembered houses
just broken into pieces.

Trees uprooted and thrown everywhere.

Cadavers lined up like piles of wood.

Mothers crying, in tears, sobbing.

There were bodies strewn everywhere.

Boy Scouts would go out with little flags,

and when they found a body,

they would put the flag in the ground,

and then a recovery crew
would come and pick up

and carry the body away on stretchers,

put them on the back of trucks,
and take them into town.

Rescuers found Lillian Curtis,

her son, and a neighbor on a hillside

overlooking the ruins of Powerhouse 2.

Everyone else in the town was dead.

They found my Great-Aunt Irene

where the mouth of the river
empties into the Pacific Ocean.

She was cold and wet,

scared, not able to speak the language.

Soledad was found many,

many, many hours
later hanging from the tree.

It traumatized her so much that
to the very day that she passed,

she could still remember
the man's name that found her.

It was a Mr. Baxter.

Mulholland
doesn't get there until hours later.

He stands in shock and awe

and horror,

looking at where the
St. Francis Dam once was.

And all that's left is this
center section of the dam.

Everything else from the dam is gone.

Within days,

tourists began showing up
at the disaster zone.

Scaling the towering monolith
that became known as

the Tombstone.

Collecting bits of debris for souvenirs.

The sightseers fed a growing
bitterness among the survivors.

The haves and have-nots
are very finely delineated

during times of distress,
during times of disaster.

It makes the inequalities
in a society very acute.

Searchers found
bodies of ranchers, housewives,

teachers, farmhands, children.

But some of the bodies were lost forever.

We never know how many,

exactly, died that night.

It was a community that
had many transients.

There were migrant workers
or migrant families.

And so many of them, maybe,
who lived along the river,

who got swept away,

they will never be known.

And the fact that we can never name them

or find out who they are

still haunts us even to this day.

For supporters of Hoover Dam,

the disaster couldn't
have come at a worse time.

Just as the Senate was about to decide

the fate of the project,
Mulholland's catastrophe

threatened to bring
down the whole enterprise.

The Hoover Dam was the largest line-item

expenditure in the history
of the United States.

They had the votes to
finally get this thing.

The problem was that
Mulholland was the biggest

visible cheerleader
for that whole proposal.

How can you be sure about
the safety of any other dam?

They've got to find a way
to deal with this very quickly.

On March 15, two days after the disaster,

California Governor C.C. Young

appointed a commission to
investigate the dam's failure.

Within a week, the commission
announced that the dam

had collapsed because of a deficiency

in the soil under the west wing.

It was a reassuring conclusion:

the failure was an aberration,

unlikely to be repeated.

It's a rabbit trail.

It's not what caused the dam to fail.

But nobody wants to
investigate it too much.

Meanwhile, the city moved quickly

to settle with the survivors.

The city agreed
upon a kind of a fixed price.

$5,000 for a human life is not enough.

But that's what was negotiated.

The city paid, very quickly.

They wanted to get it out of the way.

But for Mulholland,
the reckoning was just beginning.

Some of the victims had
died in Los Angeles County,

so the county coroner
had to determine whether

a crime had been committed.

It's not a criminal trial.

It was a trial to determine
who was responsible

and to determine if they were
going to indict anybody.

It's quite possible
that William Mulholland

would've been indicted for murder.

Eight days after the disaster,

William Mulholland took the stand

at the Los Angeles County Courthouse.

To date, 277 bodies had been found.

Hundreds were still missing.

Mulholland was at times
prickly and evasive

under interrogation, but he did, finally,

get to the heart of the matter.

"If there is any error in human judgment,"

Mulholland admitted, "I was the human.

I won't try to fasten
it on anybody else."

The fact that Mulholland takes

responsibility for the
St. Francis Dam disaster

allows people not to have to
ask really difficult questions.

If blame could be put on this individual,

you just remove the individual.

In November 1928, a few weeks before

the crucial Senate vote on Hoover Dam,

William Mulholland retired
from the Water Bureau.

It was time for him to move along.

And so long as he did, then he was,

well, he was given a pension.

They hold a banquet for him.

No mention is ever made
of the St. Francis Dam.

In the spring of
1929, the City of Los Angeles

erased one of the last
vestiges of the disaster

by obliterating the dam's remains.

But it wasn't so easy
to get rid of the very

conspicuous reminder
of the St. Francis Dam,

and of William Mulholland,
in the heart of Los Angeles.

Nobody trusted the Hollywood Dam

after St. Francis Dam went out.

They ended up drawing it down two-thirds.

It only holds one-third its
design capacity,

and it had a huge embankment fill

added to the front of it.

The monument to

the triumph of man over nature
and to William Mulholland

gets buried in dirt.

People in Hollywood no
longer have to be reminded

that there is a huge dam
looming over their heads.

Mulholland had a stroke

and his health began to deteriorate.

At family gathering, he would just

sit in the corner
and just stare into space.

William Mulholland died in Los Angeles

on July 22, 1935,

two months before the
dedication of Hoover Dam.

Heroes serve the
purpose of simplifying stories.

Villains also do something similar.

And in this story,
Mulholland is the villain.

There's lots of other folks, including

the populace of Los Angeles,
who voted for the project,

who overwhelmingly supported it.

This is a communal effort.

The St. Francis
Dam had largely disappeared

from popular memory,

but it left a deep impression
among the engineers

who were designing the next
generation of public works.

The Hoover Dam

was to be the cornerstone of a new West,

and its creators were

determined to banish
the ghost of St. Francis.

I think a lot of good
things come out of failures.

We pull back,

we do things more carefully.

St. Francis Dam had a
huge impact on Hoover Dam.

Where the St.
Francis Dam had been largely

one man's creation, sketched out and then

altered on the fly,
Hoover Dam was scrutinized

by teams of experts at every stage

of its design and construction.

It captured the imagination

as few public works ever have.

Immense dams became
defining monuments of the age.

The legacy of
the St. Francis Dam disaster

was a very short-term moral,

which is, "Build your
dams more carefully."

I wish that they had taken

a bigger moral from the story,

which is, "Never trust anyone

who tells you that
you can have it all."

When they said, "Yeah,

"even though it doesn't rain,
the sun is always shining,

"we can feed the growing
city of L.A.

and water our crops,"

all of them thought that
they could have it all.

The idea that moving
water from one geography

to another can be done
to such great effect,

to say that's a disaster
might be counterintuitive.

But in some ways,

that allowed other regions
to do the same thing.

It got us in the situation we're in today.

We can look at Mulholland Dam,
or St. Francis Dam,

or Hoover Dam, and we can think of those

as engineering marvels.

But also, all of these things

have led us to an unsustainable future.

People are so optimistic
that technology will solve

these environmental problems

that sometimes we lose sight

of other ways to solve problems.

We're going to have to
learn to manage our resources,

most particularly water.

Where are we going to get it from?

What are we going to do with it?

This story, and as little known as it is,

is a warning.

And it couldn't be more relevant to today.