S5 Ep3: Mulholland's Deadly Dam Disaster

Crimes of the Centuries

Amber Hunt and Audioboom

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

William Mulholland was summoned to the St. Francis Dam in San Francisquito Canyon early March 12, 1928, to inspect some leaks that workers found worrisome. Mulholland shrugged off the concerns and declared the dam -- the 19th he'd designed alone to feed water to the parched desert of Los Angeles -- perfectly safe. Hours later, the dam gave way, releasing billions of gallons of water downstream, killing more than 400 people.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking.
0:09.0	They change laws, change society, or even earn the label, Crime of the Century.
0:16.1	But the stories that made headlines and decades past aren't necessarily remembered today.
0:22.6	I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author, and in each episode of this show,
0:27.2	I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened.
0:34.3	This is Crimes of the Centuries.
0:40.8	Music This is Crimes of the Centuries. This is the home of the director of the Bureau of Waterworks
1:06.2	and supply for the city of Los Angeles. It was March 12, 1928. A rushed voice told the chief that the St. Francis
1:15.2	Dam was even now collapsing ferociously into the canyon below it. The 185-foot curved concrete
1:23.0	behemoth in the San Francisco City Canyon had been in service for only two years.
1:28.9	It had been built to hold back 38,000 acre feet of water for the city's imminent use.
1:35.3	The director knew that the water that had been held back by the dam would now never reach city taps,
1:41.2	but would drown a lot of whatever lived between it and the concrete rubble
1:45.8	the dam now was, because, among other things, he knew what an acre foot of water meant in real
1:52.4	terms. Hint, it's the amount of water that it would take to cover one acre of land to a depth of one
1:59.2	foot. I'll do the hard work here. That's 325,851 gallons of water
2:07.2	per acre foot. So the dam, at capacity, which it was that night, had held more than 12 billion gallons of water,
2:17.1	billion with a bee.
2:21.0	Only a few minutes before, at two and a half minutes before midnight,
2:25.4	the lights in L.A. had briefly flickered, but the chief wouldn't have noticed.
2:29.8	He'd been asleep when the world he had so carefully nurtured came apart,
2:35.8	literally, at the seams.
	...

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