Phillip Cesena transferred to San Franciscquito Canyon in February 1928 to work as a ranch hand, mucking out stalls and exercising ranch animals.
The 15-year-old had just lost his father, Leonardo, and wanted to support his mother, Erolinda, and his 12 brothers and sisters by learning how to break horses and perform trick riding for Hollywood westerns.
A month later, Cesena’s fate was sealed.
The St. Francis Dam burst, sending 12.6 billion gallons of water 15 stories high racing through Santa Clarita, Saugus, Saticoy, Piru, Fillmore and Santa Paula.
The water wiped out villages and killed about 450 people before reaching the ocean near Oxnard some 54 miles away.
Cesena is buried in an unmarked grave near the dam site, next to his mother.
Like so many others who perished when the dam collapsed on March 12, 1928, the story of the boy — whose remaining photo shows him standing on a mule practicing a trick he learned from the Navajos — also lies buried under concrete ruins and decades of indifference from a ruling class that cared more about water rights, real estate and power than honor.
Now, one community organizer is leading a push to build a memorial to remember Cesena and all the others who perished in what some call the worst civil engineering disaster in the country’s history.
Water, dams and death
The tension between a rush to grow Los Angeles with a poorly built dam that ended lives and psychologically damaged others haunts Dianne Erskine-Hellrigel, Newhall resident and executive director of the Community Hiking Club of Santa Clarita.
Such anonymity in death — especially a death that’s part of the second-largest disaster in California history — is both tragic and worthy for all to hear, she says.
“They are forgotten and they shouldn’t be. They should be remembered. They were all innocent people. They had no chance,” she said.
The community organizer has lectured, lobbied and tracked down relatives of survivors in order to recreate their harrowing stories, so their names can be etched in marble and their stories retold in a new museum — part of a national memorial at the site of the St. Francis Dam, located some 47 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the Angeles National Forest but now surrounded by the tract homes of Santa Clarita.
The St. Francis Dam Disaster National Memorial Act, a bill by Rep. Steve Knight, R-Santa Clarita and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., would honor the dead and tell their stories as well of those of the survivors. S.B.1926 has passed the House and awaits approval by the Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Senate.
The memorial would be the 37th in the country, joining the Washington Memorial and the 9-11 Memorial. It would be the first in forest land run by the U.S. Forest Service.
Activists have met with USFS administrators and potential donors such as Southern California Edison, who lost 86 men in the disaster, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which officially supports the bill, and corporations in hopes of raising $2 million in seed money if the designation is granted.
“This is going to be the gem of the U.S. Forest Service,” Erskine-Hellrigel said.
Two stories
There are two stories Erskine-Hellrigel wants to tell.
The first is of William Mulholland, who with Fred Eaton conceived and built a 233-mile aqueduct that funnels water from the Owens Valley into homes, faucets and bathtubs in Los Angeles.
Mulholland worked his way from water-pipe ditch digger to the first manager and chief engineer of the new Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply, a precursor to today’s Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Next, he built five local dams to hold aqueduct water. He knew droughts stopped and started flows from the Owens Valley and rightly predicted Los Angeles needed reservoirs.
In 1925 he started building St. Francis, which would become the largest gravity arch dam in the United States. The dam, wedged between two canyon walls was built of concrete 208 feet high, spanning 1,300 feet.
On March 12, 1928, two minutes before midnight, it held a year’s worth of water for the growing city, filled to about three inches from the top.
Earlier that day, dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger spotted muddy discharge spurting from the dam. Dams would often leak, but when the water turned brown, the possibility of an eroding base was first in his mind.
He called Mulholland. With a lieutenant, they determined the dirt from a nearby road had made the water brown.
Mulholland concluded nothing was eroding and later ate a late lunch in downtown LA.
“That was a decision he would regret for the rest of his life,” said Dr. Alan Pollack, president of the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society. “If Mulholland had realized there was a problem he would have evacuated the area.
“He was their superhero — their celebrity plus. Then this happens and it becomes a huge black mark on the city and a black mark on their hero.”
During a recent walk through the ruins of the dam still visible in the canyon off San Francisquito Canyon Road, Pollack expanded on the event’s aftermath.
“They wanted to get this out of the public memory as quickly as they could,” he said. “So they settled lawsuits with victims and they decided to blow up (the center portion that remained standing morbidly nicknamed The Tombstone) in 1929.”
Remembering the victims, survivors
The second story Erskine-Hellrigel wants to tell is the story of the people who died. She’s gone to great lengths to document their accounts.
Dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger’s body was never found. But the body of his girlfriend, Leona Johnson, was the first to be located.
She did not drown. Her body was lying at the base of the massive dam, crushed by a rock.
“Rumors continue that he told his honey ‘I’ll be right back’ but then took off for Mexico,” Erskine-Hellrigel said, “and he was down there the rest of his life sipping margaritas and having a good time.”
A list of victims compiled by Ann Stansell, a researcher at Cal State Northridge, labels some as “missing.” Most of the victims have Latino surnames — ranchers, farmhands and workers at local farms.
Ray Rising, who worked at Powerhouse #2 that took water from the Owens Valley Aqueduct and used it to make electricity, miraculously survived and actually returned to work for what’s now LADWP.
Erskine-Hellrigel located his daughter from his second marriage, Carol Rising Longo, on Facebook only a few years ago. She was willing to talk about what her father passed along. Longo had not heard the amazing tale of her father’s escape.
Rising would love to swim the reservoir after work. His skills came in handy when the water hit that terrible night.
His wife at the time, Julia, 29, drowned. The coroner’s report said his daughter Delores, 7, died of drowning, possibly indicating she died in her mother’s arms.
Their two other children, Adaline, 1, and Glenn, 5, died from debris that “crushed and mangled” their bodies, the coroner reported.
Ray Rising swam and swam but ended up tangled in power lines. As he struggled to set himself free, he grabbed onto a house floating by and pulled himself up to the roof and rode along with the current. Later, he jumped onto the cliff to safety.
“The water had ripped his clothes off,” Erskine-Hellrigel said.
Back at the Powerhouse #2 village, Lillian Curtis made her way to the top of a hill to escape the high waters. She clutched her 2-year-old son, Danny, to her breast and charged up a high hill. There, she dug a hole and placed her son in it and stuck the dog on top to keep him warm.
‘”Mommy, please don’t let the water take us,’” Danny told her, according to the account.
Later, Rising joined them there to wait for help.
Looking up at that hill during a recent sunny day, Erskine-Hellrigel said: “I can still see that hole that she put her son in, though it has been 90 years.”
The three were the only to survive from that village.
When asked in a 1978 newspaper report what she said to rescuers, Curtis answered: “All I could do was scream, scream, scream.”
When Erskine-Hellrigel places a tombstone at Cesena’s grave next month — raising money for the effort though her 501C3, St. Francis Dam National Memorial Foundation — she’ll do the same for Johnny and Emma Traxler, buried without markings in a Chatsworth cemetery.
Little Johnny, 3, and his mother were journeying from Modesto, most likely to get away from Traxler’s husband.
“Oh yeah, I’m sure she was leaving him,” Erskine-Hellrigel said, saying the husband collected the death benefit but refused to give his wife or toddler a funeral or a gravestone.
Traxler and her son stayed the night at Castaic Junction but their cabin was swept away by a raging Santa Clara River.
Johnny’s body was found alone at the cabin. It took authorities months to learn he belonged to Traxler, whose body was found miles away.
The Newhall sheriff paid for the caskets, she said. The owner of the cemetery gave up his family plot.
“The silent film actor William S. Hart took a liking to the little boy and he called him ‘Our Little Soldier’,” Erskine-Hellrigel said, adding with steely resolve:
“They will get a headstone if it is the last thing I do”
Preserving ruins, fish and frogs
On Monday, Aug. 27, Erskine-Hellrigel and Pollack walk the dusty paths of the once reservoir in slow, eerie fashion.
They point out rocks that aren’t rocks but pieces of the dam. One large portion — weighing about 20 tons — sits in the middle of the canyon miles from the dam site, like an alien spaceship.
Erskine-Hellrigel says one side of the proposed visitors center will tell the story of water in Los Angeles. The other side will tell the story of the collapse of the dam and the people who died — and survived.
At the top of the westernmost part of the dam is a view of willows and other green trees swaying in the hot breeze. The riparian area, what she calls a bog, remains wet year-round, an unusual trait for arid Southern California.
The memorial will preserve more than 400 acres, including San Francisquito Creek, home to the endangered unarmored threespine stickleback fish. Erskine-Hellrigel wants to remove the old road to free up more of the fish’s habitat.
The California red-legged frog, the state amphibian and a threatened species, live in the nearby creek but in small numbers.
“We want to put in a raised boardwalk to protect the area. Imagine, we have a bog in Southern California!” Erskine-Hellrigel said.
She said the memorial will not point fingers.
“Most of the relatives of survivors said they don’t harbor any bad feelings toward Mulholland. They just say it happened,” she said.
“We are not placing blame. We are bringing all this history forward.”
Donations for the memorial and for gravestones can be sent to St. Francis Dam National Memorial Foundation, c/o Dianne Erskine-Hellrigel, 24820 Fourl Road, Newhall, CA.
