Flood in the Desert

Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, about 40 miles north of Los Angeles, one of the biggest dams in the country blew apart, releasing a wall of water 20 stories high and causing the second deadliest disaster in California history. Ten thousand people lived downstream. Flood in the Desert tells the dramatic story of the St. Francis Dam disaster, which killed over 400 people and destroyed millions of dollars worth of property. The dam's collapse washed away the reputation of William Mulholland, the father of modern Los Angeles, and jeopardized more extensive plans to transform the West. A self-taught engineer, the 72-year-old Mulholland launched the city's remarkable growth by building both a cement aqueduct to pipe water 233 miles from the Owens Valley and Sierra Nevada Mountains across the Mojave Desert and the St. Francis Dam to hold a full year's supply of water for Los Angeles. Now, Mulholland was promoting a massive new project: the Hoover Dam. The collapse of the St. Francis Dam, the city's largest single reservoir, was a colossal engineering and human disaster that might have slowed the national project to tame the West. But within days, a concerted effort was underway to erase the dam's failure from popular memory.