[ALOUD] Catastrophe in California: A Reappraisal of the St. Francis Dam Collapse

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>> In March of 1928, the Saint Francis Dam north of Los Angeles designed by William Mulholland as a reservoir for the California Aqueduct collapsed. It was the largest engineering disaster in California history, and it is inextricably woven into the epic history of water in Los Angeles. As this is the centennial year of the California Aqueduct, we thought this was the appropriate time to convene a panel to discuss the Saint Francis tragedy and it's enduring catastrophic and cultural significance. So our distinguished guests tonight include historians. And one of my favorite co-conspirators William Deverell, Professor of History at USC, where he specializes in the history of California and the American West. And he is the author of several books including: White Washed Adobe, The Rise of Los Angeles, and The Remaking of its Mexican Past.

Another historian Donald C. Jackson the author of Building The Ultimate Dam, John S. Eastwood, and The Control Of Water In The American West, and Pastoral and Monumental Dams, Postcards and The American Landscape. He's also the coauthor of the article “Privilege and Responsibility: William Mulholland and the Saint Francis Dam Disaster” published in California History. And he teaches history at Lafayette College in eastern Pennsylvania.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, activist, and the author of 13 books about ecology, environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope and memory. Her many books include: A Paradise Built in Hell; The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and the best selling volume of 19 essays and 22 innovative maps titled Infinite City of San Francisco Atlas; and most recently the very beautiful book The Far Away Nearby. And she'll be reading and discussing that book tomorrow night at Sky Light books at 7:30 so you can join Rebecca again there.

Our moderator tonight, just released from royal baby watch, is Patt Morrison a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a frequent radio host, and the author of the best selling Rio L.A.: Tales from the Los Angeles River.

Please join me in welcoming our distinguished panelists. And some of them will be signing their books in the lobby after the program. Thank you.

[Applause]

PATT MORRISON: Thank you all for coming. The images you have all seen will be among those we will be discussing tonight.

All of us who write about Los Angeles regard it in some fashion or another as a magic slate. The City writes upon it, lifts it, erases it, and writes upon it again.

We have the gift of having not clung to historical memory and historical grudges, but we're also cursed with having forgotten it. And you know what the say about people forgetting.

We also have in this city a sense of the artifice of the landscape. Carrie Mc.Williams called it An Island Upon the Land the engineered city up on top a natural landscape. And what happened on the night of March 12th and 13th, 1928, is an example of that. It's part of the discussion of the 100th Anniversary of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and what it did to change Los Angeles; the way we think about Los Angeles; and the way we regard the City and ourselves.

To that end, we have this wonderful panel here to talk about this event and its repercussions to this day in the City of Los Angeles and beyond.

So thank you all for being here.

We might perhaps ask Bill Deverell to set the scene for us that night.

WILLIAM DEVERELL: Sure, I'll give it a shot.

One of the things that we encounter very quickly, when you look at this disaster, is just how horrific and shocking it was to a city that had arisen in the early 20th century on this juggernaut of growth and accomplishment. So a lot of that wrapped up in the persona and success of William Mulholland. So just to imagine how surprising and horrible this accident was, there's a sense of shock across the landscape that reverberates perhaps unto this day.

But, when I teach this event to my students, of course, water and engineering play a really significant part in the story. But the ironic comparison of having just accomplished having built the aqueduct not that many years prior to this, beginning very ambitious work for real on the LA River, and then this very, very horrible accident takes place. So just the kind of counter point to success of engineering triumph is surrounding the juggernaut growth and demographic change in Los Angeles is really compelling.

PATT MORRISON: Let's pull our mics a little bit closer to make sure we can be heard far and wide in this universe and beyond as our paperwork requires us to do.

So, DC, you live in Pennsylvania. But from 3,000 miles away, you've heard the reverberations of this disaster, and it's engaged you.

DONALD JACKSON: Yeah, actually water in the West is what first engaged me. And just the importance of water and the place of water in an arid landscape, and it's special relationship to the political economy. That's what I got interested in. Not specifically about even Mulholland and Los Angeles, but the technology of dam design.

In fact the first time I ever visited the Saint Francis site, I didn't come up the canyon. I came down the Antelope Valley because I was up there studying and interested in the Little Rock Dam, which was built by the Little Rock and Palmdale irrigation districts; and built contemporarily with Saint Francis, but with a very different relationship.

So my sense of this is not just being, you know, in Pennsylvania and not just having an interest in Los Angeles, but is this relationship in water storage and this very distinct political economy that is oriented toward storing flood waters and what that means in terms of the economy. And then that's what sort of grew in me in having this real interest in trying to understand what happened at Saint Francis, and what it's impact was, and how it related to dam building across the West in the time period since.

PATT MORRISON: Some of the images we saw are from your collection.

DONALD JACKSON: That's right. Oh, I'm a postcard and photo collector. And Saint Francis does have a pretty good record left by people who went up, some amateur snapshoters, and others that took quick pictures of the carnage.

PATT MORRISON: And Rebecca is going to give us the poetry of this.

REBECCA SOLNIT: I am?

PATT MORRISON: Yes.

REBECCA SOLNIT: You know, I'm on this panel because I know absolutely nothing about the Saint Francis Dam disaster apparently, but I do know something about disasters. It's really interesting looking in the Wikipedia entry I have to confess. And what it made me think about because there's a 120-foot wall of water when the dam broke -- I was in Fukushima for the one-year anniversary -- not Fukushima but the prefectures north of there -- for what the tsunami did in Japan in 2011. It was very similar in terms of some of the damage you saw like huge steel girders twisted and things like that.

So it's interesting because I don't actually know how people behaved in this disaster. I know how they behaved in a lot other disasters -- and a lot of sort of engineering disasters. Japan was a social -- engineering disaster as much as natural disaster. And, of course, Hurricane Katrina where the least worse thing that happened to New Orleans was a hurricane. Then there was Army Corpse of Engineers and the levies. And then there was the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, the Bush Administration, the mayor, and the governor we're the real disasters that hit the City. So, you know, disasters there are some commonalities about human behavior, but the circumstances vary so much.

PATT MORRISON: What do you see in this one that resonates in the same fashion?

REBECCA SOLNIT: You know -- you know, just from the wreckage, it's hard to tell what the human story was. It's interesting, when I did my book on disasters, A Paradise Built in Hell, I thought I was going to have front piece photographs, but how people felt and what they looked like were so completely different that you often heard people who had just passionately absorbed and energized and rather heroic, but all you saw was really bedraggled people in the rubble. So what things look like and what they feel like are no more different than in disasters. Although the San Francisco earthquake did beget a lot of jaunty pictures of people cooking in funny little homemade kitchens with hilarious slogans on them like "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we may have to go to Oakland" is the famous one.

PATT MORRISON: I think that still holds, you know.

REBECCA SOLNIT: You know, it's like eat, drink, and be merry because Silicon Valley is pushing us all to Oakland now.

[Audience laughter]

PATT MORRISON: Bill, can you evoke for us the feeling -- let's say, you know, a year or so before the disaster and then a year or so after -- how LA regarded itself? How it's institutions regarded themselves? More than 600 people and yet no one really knows the count. More than 600 hundred people reckoned dead, but like 1934 after the floods and even 1938, they may not even be telling, they may not even know the actual numbers.

DONALD JACKSON: That's a great question, Patt. I think in so many ways this disaster gets pegged rightly, wrongly, some mix between the two on Mr. Mulholland. It's the Shakespearean drama of the great rise of his career with the remarkable completion of the aqueduct just a decade or decade and a half before that. And then this, you know, tremendous disaster that results in the death of hundreds and hundreds of people. So he carries the focus of the disaster much more than we see in the institutional history of even the Department of Water and Power history of LA. And he's larger than life even before this disaster. So the Shakespearean quality to his fall, where he says, "I envy the dead." You know he's famous for these really clipped, very insightful speeches. When the aqueduct opens, he gives the famous "There it is take it" remark, and then he envies the dead in this disaster. So much of the oxygen and the reverberations of the dam disaster are laid right at his feet.

And then the reverberations are, I think, still happening actually. I mean I think, if you go to the site it's very, very moving. You can still see the detritus. You can still see the way it cut through the landscape. Of course, the dead remain in some respects uncounted. And so the reverberations are still very much there. They are reverberating beyond the saga and downfall of a single man.

PATT MORRISON: And William Mulholland, as Bill said, was given to very pithy comments. When asked whether he would run for mayor of Los Angeles, he said, "I would rather give birth to a porcupine backwards than be mayor of Los Angeles." If only our politicians in this day and age could emulate his brevity.

PATT MORRISON: DC, you just went to the site.

DONALD JACKSON: I was up there on Saturday; that's correct.

PATT MORRISON: And what did it invoke in you?

DONALD JACKSON: Well this is about the 15th time I've been there. Every time it's a little different. I think what it evoked for me though because it wasn't just going to the dam. It's traversing and traveling through the Santa Clara River Valley, and seeing that 54-mile swath that was devastated by the flood as it made on its way down to the Pacific just south of Ventura. And, what I'm struck by, is how the people who mostly suffered were the people who had no interest and got no value or benefit from the dam or from the aqueduct.

The aqueduct cuts through the upper reaches of the Santa Clara River. I call it -- or, in the book that Norris and I are finishing -- it's a corridor and a weigh station. It's sort of this accident of geology. The aqueduct comes through the upper reaches of the Santa Clara River on its way to Sylmar, but that's where the storage dam was built. So when it washes out, no one in LA gets hit. No one who benefited from the dam, suffered from it.

Now there were some employees of the Bureau of Power and Light at Powerhouse No. 2 that certainly died and suffered a horrible death, but the destruction is brought primarily to a people and place that this wasn't their dam.

PATT MORRISON: Just like the Owen's Valley.

DONALD JACKSON: Very similar. I think there are ways of connecting it. There are also ways that prior to the damn washing out, if you look at what is today United Water Conservation District, which is based is Santa Paula, it's origins were Santa Clara River Protective Association. And they were involved in a water rights dispute with the City because through the construction of this dam, which was primarily to store Owen's Valley water, the City also laid claim to 5,000 acre feet of flood water every year in the 37 and a half square miles above the dam. And so there was a -- this was a mini version of Owen's Valley in terms of there's the leviathan of Los Angeles sort of coming into this rural area and wanting to use it to it's purposes.

So when I go to the dam, it's not just going to the dam; but it's taking that trip up the canyon and then also taking it down going through -- well now it's called Santa Clarita, but then it was Saugus -- and then making your way down past Castaic Junction to Kemp where many people died, and then Piru, Fillmore, Bardsdale really got it, Santa Paula. And those were the communities that really had to deal with the death, but they didn't get any benefit from it. And that's the part that I find, when I go there, that's one of the things I want to keep in mind.

PATT MORRISON: The paradox for me -- apropos of what you've written, Rebecca -- is that we live in this part of the world in fear of the natural disaster and yet here is a disaster of our own engineering.

REBECCA SOLNIT: You know the disaster sociologists who are so central to my book have a wonderful saying: There's no such thing as a natural disaster. And earthquakes don't kill people, architecture does. You know that none of these are very natural and, you know, it has to do with human decisions. And then something like this, water, what can be more natural than water? But who decided to pile it up unstably above, you know, tens of thousands of people.

So -- and it's interesting because when they're perceived as natural disasters, people often unite and respond, et cetera. But, when it's perceived as social disaster, as a betrayal by the authorities, it often creates division and strife and it also freaks the hell out of the authorities because they've been caught -- they failed.

And disasters often unfold like insurrections and revolutions where there's a sense that -- and I saw that in Fukushima. And I saw that in Hurricane Katrina, which helped bring down the Bush Administration, and the Bush Administration people admitted that, you know, it discredits authorities and does really interesting political things.

I don't know what Mulholland felt clearly, but if there were larger repercussions --

PATT MORRISON: I'll ask Bill about that because here you've got the 1920's. It's The City Beautiful Movement. Los Angeles is in a big boom era. The water from Owen's Valley helped to make that possible. And the City was really in a very confident and optimistic position. So maybe you can characterize what this did to the psyche of the city, and how it altered maybe the City's sense of it's own destiny.

WILLIAM DEVERELL: I'm not sure I know. You know the 20's sets the table for LA to become a great city. It's not, comparatively, it's not a great city until after the Second World War in size, and power, and economic clout, and innovation, et cetera. But the 20's sets the stage. So the Metropolitanization of Los Angeles is well under way in the 20s and it's prodigious. And water certainly was clearly important to that. So the thinking about water is really profound.

So '28 is the same year the Metropolitan Water District gets created. So thinking very, very strongly about water and how to move it; how to think about it; and how to tie it to the City's future.

The psyche question about LA and the downfall, in many respects, I do think Mulholland is singled out. Again, perhaps justly, but he takes so much of the weight of this and does so purposefully too as well. But remember '28 is almost '29 and so, when we get to '29 and the fall of the stock market and the arrival of The Depression, that also lets out a lot of air in Los Angeles's balloon.

PATT MORRISON: And what was the nature of the inquiry into the cause? Did it have an inquisitorial tone? Was it more in sorrow than in anger? How did this proceed?

WILLIAM DEVERELL: Don?

DONALD JACKSON: Oh, I've been reading that 800 page transcript of the inquest. But I should also say there are many investigations. There are many studies.

There's the one that the coroner's office under -- takes on. And this is the one we have the best public record of. It's not always the most edifying testimony. But I would say the one investigation that takes on the most important historically is the one that Governor CC Young sponsored, and which it's report came out within two weeks of the flood.

And I think what's important to understand -- this gets at this issue of the 20's and you raised the metropolitan water district -- what is on the landscape, what politically-economically, the primary issue of March of 1928 is the Boulder Canyon Project Act. Boulder Dam. Sometimes known as Swing-Johnson named after Representative Swing and Senator Johnson. This is what the future of Los Angeles is based upon.

And it's called Boulder Dam. That is what is presently Hoover Dam. That is a concrete curved gravity dam identical in form, but certainly not in design, but in basic form to Saint Francis.

And to understand the investigations, to understand how this was carried out, you have to in my mind -- and Norris and I had a number of discussions about this before he passed away -- you have to put in the context of the politics around the control of the Colorado River, the Colorado Aqueduct, and Boulder Dam. And so that's one of those issues in the back to understand why this had to be put to rest, put to bed, to sort of be gotten beyond so quickly is because so much depended upon this next big aqueduct, which Mulholland was very involved with.

If you look at the history of the MWD, Mulholland is there. Of course, it's Los Angeles that files the first, you know, 1500 cubic feet per second water right in 1924. This is Mulholland project. Boulder Dam is going to be paid for by the City of Los Angeles cause they're going to buy the electricity to pump the water through the aqueduct. And that becomes, I think, in trying to understand what these investigations, what is the background on these inquests and investigations, is to understand that political context. And without it, you don't understand why they have to get this behind them so quickly.

And I think this is one of the reasons why, boy, if you look -- well you can read the obituaries of Mulholland when he passes away in '35. Rarely will you see Saint Francis mentioned. And that becomes -- there's a reason why they wanted to put that behind them.

PATT MORRISON: To that reason -- I'm going to ask the larger positioning of this to Rebecca -- how complicit our own psychology is in dealing with these deals of the sort that we have made? How much do we go along looking at the benefit that accrues to us? How much of this is just wishful thinking? How much of it is the lack of persistence of memory?

REBECCA SOLNIT: You know it makes me think of John McPhee's The Control of Nature about the LA people who keep getting caught into debris basins because of the amnesia of what debris basins do.

But it also, just listening to conversation, makes me think of the larger history of these kind of colossal follies across the West. These places of wreckage. The other great water disaster of Southern California, which is the Salton Sea 1906, where it took them months and months to figure out how to plug the Colorado River from all flowing into what would become the Salton Sea.

And just -- and it's interesting because the hubris that everything can be controlled and the catastrophic consequences seem to happen over and over.

Another thing, when we start talking about Boulder Dam, I also start thinking about Lake Powell and Lake Mead and climate change. And that whole hydraulic engineering of the Colorado River was based on a lot of optimistic assumptions about everything including a stable climate that's being undermined. And both of those dams are prophesied to reach dead pool and stop functioning in the not so distant future.

And then, of course, you get into interesting territory of sort of shockingly sudden disasters like a dam break, and incremental disasters of the destruction of systems and ecologies in places. And the great thing about the West is we have lots of both.

PATT MORRISON: And yet apart from the West, the history of this country is almost an adversarial one with nature from the very get go. The hostility of the environment you had to conquer. You can go back to the pilgrims nearly starving to do death. And so did that frame the way that we approach these things even to this day?

REBECCA SOLNIT: You know I think of Tonto saying, "What do you mean we?" [Laughter] I don't think it's you either, Patt. I don't think its me. [Chuckling] You know, it's the mindset of power. Power and big technology et cetera that, you know, that is adversarial and a conquest mentality. And that has this incredible hubris that these things are going to work. A lot of them work short term and a lot of them -- most of them don't work long-term.

And there's the short term thinking, you know, particularly in the West. The eastern landscape is all lush and muddy and grassy, and you leave it alone for 10 minutes and Detroit turns into a forest. You know, it's really forgiving and this place isn't so forgiving, which is the difference in the arid parts of the world.

PATT MORRISON: Bill?

WILLIAM DEVERELL: I think as well it's a case study. The Colorado, the Salton Sea, the Saint Francis disaster, it's a case study of the inability to deal with the difficulty of moving and holding back water. So the innocuousness of a cup of water or a pitcher of water is one way to look at it. But these stories are the stories of how you hold back astonishing -- or don't hold back -- astonishing amounts of water.

At the same time, the velocity of change in Los Angeles in the early 20th century is so much that up until about the turn of the century, they think the LA River will be enough water for us. Then they think the Owen's River will be enough water for us. And then they think we need the Colorado River that might be enough water for us. And then they think we need another Owen's Aqueduct; we'll put another one in there. So the velocity of this disparity or of this running out of water, necessitates -- on the powers that be, and the water providers, and the growth machinery -- greater and greater attempts to move and hold back bigger and bigger chunks of water, and it bounces back.

PATT MORRISON: By now I've almost given up the struggle to try and persuade people, especially people in the East, that China Town is not a documentary [Laughter] but it does make some oblique references to this disaster to the dam.

Bill, maybe you can talk about the film and how it spun it's web and cast it's spell over the storytelling of this --

WILLIAM DEVERELL: Sure. With the embarrassing admission, that I've seen the movie so many times. It's just amazing. [Laughter]

REBECCA SOLNIT: That's not embarrassing.

WILLIAM DEVERELL: There's a very clever --

PATT MORRISON: It's research.

WILLIAM DEVERELL: -- the entire movie is just so clever. And it's not history; it's a movie, but it's historically informed and clever.

So there's an early reference in the City Hall meeting where the sheep come in. There's an early reference where Hollis Mulwary comes in and talks about a dam that falls down. That's the Saint Francis. And he says he's not going to build the -- whatever it is -- because the Vanderlip Dam fell down. That's a brilliant little chestnut of historical facts about probably a reference to Frank Vanderlip. The financier who laid out and built Palos Verdes. So it's a certain power clique and landed gentry reference to Los Angeles.

So that movie that reference to Saint Francis is in that movie. And certainly the cycles of drought either real or imagined, contrived or conspiratorial that are woven through that movie; and the justification for doing certain things to water in LA or land, that's drawn directly from this era of the teens and 20s.

PATT MORRISON: And actually there's a wonderful exhibition about LA history at the Natural History Museum. And one of the lures to get you in it said, I think, the slogan is: Cow Poop Made LA. And it's true. And some of these factors that we regard as small and incidentally natural, become major natural forces.

DC, can you give us -- from looking at, you know, maybe half dozen hours from that evening until the next day -- can you give us a very quick kind of tick-tock of what happened?

DONALD JACKSON: Oh, boy. Yeah, I can. First of all, let me get back to China Town. Cause I agree in the East that's what people think of. I always thought that Noah Cross, though, he is very different than William Mulholland in some respects, I think, brings across the demeanor. You know some might call it arrogance, but others just call it this will to succeed. That line at the end where they talk about why are you doing this -- the future.

I think this is what you get at this idea of what has driven Los Angeles interest in water; the Southland's interest in water is the future. Realistically, if you don't import any water, the base -- the Southland Basin can sustain what 2 million people.

Now, if we're all willing to agree -- and somehow we would expect people in 1910 to say, yes, that's what we're going to do. We are going to consign ourselves to two million people. Then, okay. But that's not the way history works. That's not the way people work; right.

I don't think anyone was tricked into voting for those bonds to sustain this. Now some people think there was some skull drudgery along the way, but I don't think so. Most people benefited from this. It was a rising tide that lifted everyone.

PATT MORRISON: Or at least it was how it was sold to them.

DONALD JACKSON: That's how it was sold, but this is my view. I don't think you really had to sell that many people. I think they were sold on this. This is why Mulholland -- this is why it was such a great tragedy. He was a hero to most citizens in Los Angeles cause he brought the water and he -- the economy grew. The political economy of water is dependent upon that.

But getting back to your question. This is a tragedy -- when the dam washes out or the east side, you know, fails because of uplift acting through the mica shifts, five minutes later is when Powerhouse No. 1 gets hit.

PATT MORRISON: So this is two minutes before midnight on the 12th of March?

DONALD JACKSON: That's right. 12:57. We know that because the Edison, The Borrell Lancaster Power Line, goes right down or went right down the canyon. When it washes out, then you have a blip. The power goes out. So we have a very definite time of when it goes out. Then it's over that course of the next five hours, you can sort of follow the dam down. I think it's the people --

PATT MORRISON: But stop for a minute. Think of five hours of water rushing. I think the average was six miles per hour.

DONALD JACKSON: When it got to the end, it was going six. I think the average was about ten.

PATT MORRISON: Five hours of that?

DONALD JACKSON: That's right. But, boy, that mile and a half down stream, that's where the wall of water is 120 feet high. That's where you look at Powerhouse No. 2 and look up on the side and you can just see this. That's a major concrete building that just disappears. You can imagine what happened to the bungalows that the workers for the Bureau of Power and Light lived in.

And then, it's in that first nine miles as it comes down San Francisquito Canyon, that's when it's at it's most horrible. That's when it's moving. Well it starts at 18 miles per hour, but it's just coming down. When it gets to what is now Santa Clarita, just past the Harry Carey Ranch, then it begins to open up. It's much wider. Then a lot of the silt, the sediment that came from the landslide on the east side begins to drop out, and the Newland Ranch gets covered by a huge amount of debris.

That's where, in the thing you saw, that bridge was the bridge on the ridge route right near what is now Magic Mountain. Not far from -- when you are on I-5 and you're going -- oh, there's Magic Mountain -- you are within a couple hundred yards of where that bridge washed out. Then it slows down.

PATT MORRISON: And you don't see any signs about anything about it, right?

DONALD JACKSON: There are no signs. There's one plaque up at Powerhouse No. 2, but it's behind a fence. And it's -- I almost missed it this time. But no, there are no signs. There are no: Hey, let's take a trip. Let's follow the flood.

You know, that's what's different than Johnstown flood. You go to Johnstown, which killed two thousand people. It's a national park. You can go. It's a national park. You can go there. Of course, that has something to do with a Congressman that wanted to get that in. But very different memory here. But as it continues down --

PATT MORRISON: But you got 30 or 40 years difference in time and attitudes about that sort of thing too.

DONALD JACKSON: Yeah, but they didn't make it a national park until the 60's. It has just a very different history because this is part of LA wanting to put this behind. You know, there is a sense -- whereas in Johnstown, it was sort of recognized more. There's a different dynamic. But there, this is something almost to celebrate not in a fun way, but as something you want to remember. Whereas, Saint Francis you don't.

But as it comes down, the place where the most damage occurs or the most destruction and death, is this little rail side called Kemp. Where an Edison crew, Southern California Edison, were building a transmission line down the valley. This was where they were camped for the night. And this is before the warnings. There's a whole history of warnings. Some people might want to ask questions about that about how the word gets out. No word has gotten to Kemp at 1:20 in the morning. And out of an encampment of 154 people, 84 people died. That was the picture you saw there with the car flipped over.

Then it continues down. The last community that gets hit unaware is Bardsdale, which is just across the river to the south from Fillmore. Fortunately for communities like Fillmore or Piru and Santa Paula, they're up on the north slope and the river is on the south side. So as it comes down and it begins to lose power, by the end it's only about six feet high. At this point it's about ten feet high; of course, that can be very destructive. But as it comes down, boy, it hits those communities at Bardsdale pretty bad.

By the time it gets to Santa Paula at about 3:10 in the morning, the word has gotten out. This is part of the lore of Ventura County the Santa Clara Valley. Officer Thorton is on his motorcycle getting the word out. So there aren't many deaths there, but then it finds it's way to the sea.

PATT MORRISON: He's the two-stroke Paul Revere of --

DONALD JACKSON: That's right, he's the Paul Revere. And so that's where this dynamic where -- I think also about it, and I don't mean to think too much, but that was a pretty big question you asked.

PATT MORRISON: Yes.

DONALD JACKSON: There are two really distinct sections of the disaster. There's Los Angeles County that's what's up there in the San Francisquito Canyon, what is now Santa Clarita, what was then referred to as Saugus, that's one zone.

Then you have the Newhall Ranch. Even today, if you drive south on 126, there's not much between there and Piru. You have Rancho Camulos, but that's about the only settlement. It's very distinct. And then you get to Piru, and then you get to Fillmore and you have -- that's Ventura County, and those are two very different communities.

And the way the flood played out in the aftermath, there was a real division between Los Angeles County and Ventura County and how they responded.

PATT MORRISON: Rebecca, are we -- at least do we think of ourselves as too cynical, too wise today to buy into what Bill was talking about? Here you have Mulholland the mythic hero. You know the sort of wet Prometheus of Los Angeles I suppose --

REBECCA SOLNIT: Wow.

PATT MORRISON: -- you can call him. Do we not buy into that? That's pretty good. I'm going to write that down. Do we not buy into that anymore?

REBECCA SOLNIT: I think most people, you know, there was this tremendous optimism. I've been trying to figure out for years how to write about the kind of madness of modernism where the present is better than the past. The mindset that tore down Penn Station and built the atrocity in it's place; that thought asbestos was an awesome material; that you could never have enough plastic; that nuclear power would be too cheap to meter; and never mind the waste, and stuff. There's that kind of big science, the future's golden, Jetson's mindset of a lot of the 20th century. And it really starts -- and it's also kind of big science authoritarianism.

You know, whether it's -- you look at the Diego Rivera -- I remember looking at Diego Rivera murals in Detroit which Henry Ford commissioned. And it's like why is the biggest capitalist commissioning a communist to paint murals? It's because actually they're a vision of an industrial worker's future is very similar to some minor questions about who runs things, but not what most people's lives consist of.

And it's, you know, it really was this kind of sense that human beings are malleable. That we're so damn smart and rational we can invent a better human being than the ones that existed before. And we can reinvent the circumstances of our lives; and artifice and artificialility are good things. And, you know, part of -- that all seems to me starts to collapse with the beats in the 60's, the anti-authoritarianism that's really a distrust both of centralized authority but also the authority of technology in many ways. And it's a dialect that's still going on.

We're still, you know, I feel deeply oppressed by Silicon Valley, which is destroying my city, but which is also invading all of our privacy. You know, we really are in this very weird dystopian moment now for most of us.

Then there's climate change whether -- what all that exciting and internal combustion brought us. So I think that yeah, absolutely. You have this arc of incredible not even optimism, but hubris about of how much we can control the world around us. And we now have, you know, we're in the anthrop scene. We're no longer in the, you know, the idea that the climate and the age are man made, and man made as disasters not as triumphs. Maybe the difference is that maybe they thought they would completely control nature and it would be a triumph. We now know in a sense we completely controlled but as catastrophe on the unimaginable scale of what the next 10,000 years are going to look like --

PATT MORRISON: We may shift the mechanism, though, but we still believe in the medium. In this case, well [Indiscernible Name: A. Morris] writes about this. How we invested all of our hopes in the idea that the app is kind of the savior. That we're all going to liberate ourselves by the app. And we'll lose weight thanks to the app. And that we've defied this. So It seems like we just translated it from, you know, erector sets into microchips; right.

REBECCA SOLNIT: I'm just laughing because I'm thinking is that he who lives by the app, shall die by the app. [Laughter]

PATT MORRISON: I think that's the sum of it.

REBECCA SOLNIT: You know, it's funny. Because, you know, the Bay Area -- and I just want to say that I represent Northern California, but I come in friendship. My father was born and raised in Boyle Heights and you can still the Sole Bootery in the Terrazzo Geurrero shoes there. [Laughter]

But, you know, we're really divided between the techno psychosis of Silicon Valley, which is really just big modernism. Like oh, wouldn't it be awesome if you wore glasses that dictated information to you from a corporation all the time for example, and also good for surreptitiously filming other men in bathrooms it turns out.

You know, but the rhetoric -- but their vision of the good life is sort of my vision of 1984 with some Brave New World thrown in. And, you know, so there's really -- there hasn't been a lot of loud rhetoric. Although, I've tried to be really loud against Silicon Valley. But we're really beginning to enter not only the conversation about what we've brought with climate change and what kind of scaling back too much minor consumption per capita and much more.

And there will be some, I think, with climate change, which is something I work on a lot. You know, we will need some very sophisticated technology some sort of very well-designed solar and wind and other kinds of stuff. But also just a backing off from the idea that more is better, and we're going to have big everything, and we're going to control, and et cetera.

But so it's very weird because the Bay Area is full of lots of back to Earth Luddites and alternative technology permaculture people. And its full of these sort of new overlords of all our lives: The people -- the young billionaires at Google, and Facebook, and Twitter, and et cetera. It's, you know, it's very weird. [Laughter] Very.

PATT MORRISON: The parallel I think of when I'm looking at DC's and other's pictures and reading about the coroner's report, the investigation, the one that comes to mind is the Titanic. Here you have this epitome of hubris, which came to what the Greeks could have told you was the predictable end. And then there was the fall out, the repercussions, the finger pointing. But there's been some revisionism recently.

Maybe, DC, you can speak to this, but maybe you can talk about it a little bit: The initial findings, the sense of fault. Then over time how that changed? How science allowed that to change?

WILLIAM DEVERELL: Well DC can speak to the particulars much more [indiscernible] than I can.

One thing that's good to think about contextually here, is this is an era -- the hubristic notion of all this -- is an era where Los Angeles the magnificent thinks in an engineering capacity, and a bond capacity, and a water capacity, and electrical capacity to reach well beyond any municipal borders. And so Los Angeles is growing so rapidly and the needs are so insatiable that Los Angeles reaches across the Southwest, reaches into the snowpack of The Rocky's and The Sierras to drive that growth machinery. But something that happens just over the mountains is, in a sense, lost to the memory of Los Angeles.

So the reach is really far, but the memory and grappling with the consequences that reach tends not to traverse that depth or that breath of a landscape. So it's very important to remember Los Angeles, while it's bounded by municipal and county boundaries, of course, it's reach is so much more gargantuan than that. But it's awareness in an every day capacity, of man and woman in the street capacity is not that. The fairly modest dreams of individual Angelenos have to do with more or less a bungalow and a lawn. And the bungalow and the lawn require certain fairly modest amounts of water and power, but those are distributed to by the millions.

PATT MORRISON: Rebecca, why don't you go ahead --

REBECCA SOLNIT: I just want to say something cause, you know -- and speaking as the Northerners, there's always a sense of Los Angeles being rapacious about water and there's a lot to it. But it's worth saying that 80 percent of the water consumed in California goes, you know, managed water, goes to agriculture and 20 percent to, you know, us people and houses and things like that.

PATT MORRISON: Domestic consumption.

REBECCA SOLNIT: Yes, that's the phrase.

PATT MORRISON: And, even if you divide it that way, more than half of what we use in our houses is used outside sort of ornamentally or just --

REBECCA SOLNIT: Yeah.

PATT MORRISON: -- sprucing up our steps.

DONALD JACKSON: This story of the aqueduct and the Colorado River Aqueduct and their reliance on snowpack goes right to Rebecca's point on climate change. If the snowpack continues to decline precipitously -- so, for instance, right now The Sierra snowpack just did not give Southern California what it's used to giving us in some respects. Then the water needs of this metropolitan region are going to have to be answered domestically; have to be answered here by conservation and preservation and different uses of water because you're not going to get it out of the snow anymore.

PATT MORRISON: And this is the exact opposite of what city and government leaders want you to do. They want this sort of this thoughtless prophesy so you don't even have to think or --

DONALD JACKSON: Well there's certainly some of that, but --

PATT MORRISON: But, if you see the reaction in the city -- part of the reason we have the leaf blowers now is because the restriction on hosing down your driveways and who was going to pick up a broom --

WILLIAM DEVERELL: I hate leaf blowers.

PATT MORRISON: Sam Yorty who got elected in part because he said that the housewives shouldn't have to sort the cans. And years later Tom Bradley was asked, "What contributions Sam Yorty made to the city." And he said, "He integrated the garbage." [Laughter] He can be a very funny man Tom Bradley.

DONALD JACKSON: Things have changed. There is institutional awareness on the part of city leaders, and certain capacities --

PATT MORRISON: True.

DONALD JACKSON: -- and certain institutions about preservation -- about changing the garden regimes of Southern California into more drought resistant, succulent, drought tolerant plants. So it's happening. It's slow. It's generational.

DONALD JACKSON: Something I think is interesting -- I hadn't really thought about it until you said it, and it's the idea what if the dam had been built in the upper San Fernando Valley? It could be right. There's the two [indiscernible]. The upper [indiscernible] and the San Fernando Dam. If the geology had put the really big reservoir there, the reservoir site, you could have had a disaster that came down through the San Fernando Valley and then down through LA. And the memory of that would be very different than the memory of what Saint Francis is. The people, the citizens of Los Angeles, would not have allowed that to have been forgotten. They would have had an interest in it.

I never really thought about it before. But there's a way in which that price was paid by someone else, and that was a lot easier to kind of block out. Whereas, if it happened -- and, boy, I think there might have been a park. There could be a national park based upon it. You know, in the 71 earthquake, the lower San Fernando Dam almost collapses. Fortunately, it didn't have a lot of water in it. But even that is probably more remembered in some ways in the San Fernando Valley, than any memory of what had happened just on the other side of the mountain --

PATT MORRISON: Which claimed ten times as many lives as the Sylmar quake.

DONALD JACKSON: Right. I don't know if it was Sylmar.

PATT MORRISON: Fifty something.

DONALD JACKSON: Yeah, maybe. Certainly nobody died because the dam collapsed. It was only partial. But there's the one, if you don't pay the price, then maybe you're willingness to or how you remember it is going to be different. And, in that way, a lot of times memory gets tossed around a lot in the history business. But this is one where sometimes -- it's not just the buzz word -- there is sort of a collective memory of how it gets remembered. And boy that would have been a very different memory if San Fernando had paid the price.

PATT MORRISON: We have in Mulholland a figure who's lionized and then to some extent demonized. What was the ultimate determination? As it's still in the works, even now people are looking at this and say: What caused this dam to break?

DONALD JACKSON: Well that's something that we can probably [indiscernible]. It failed because -- lets put it this way, it wasn't a very good design. When Norris and I wrote our article that was published in 2004, the thrust and gist of it is, you know, that concrete gravity -- curved gravity dam built between 1924 and 1926 was not up to the standards of other major concrete gravity dams being built in the area.

If you look at any of the other reclamation service dams, if you look at Elephant Butte, if you look at Arrow Rock, if you look in the Central Valley, if you look at the original x checker, or if you look at the original Don Pedro that AJ Wiley designed, very different designs in terms of grouting, drainage, cutoff trenches. Or the one really to look at is the O'Shannassy Dam or the Hetch Hetchy Dam. Look at those photos, look at the Engineering News Record articles that talked -- that published or publicized how it was built.

Saint Francis did not come close to that. And then in the midst of construction where all the original talk about it and the spillway is going to be at 1825 feet above sea level. Construction starts sometime in that period between July of 1924 and March of 1925. The spillway all the sudden becomes 1835; and the capacity, the reservoir, goes from 32 thousand to 38 thousand. And that is the question of like how does the design accommodate that increase.

Charles Outland who's name hasn't come up here, but I think it should. The person who was from Santa Paula who had experienced the disaster when he was a teenager. He did a really good job uncovering and sort of making it known how that raising of the dam took place and how -- the photographs that are actually now within the archives of United Water. The earliest surviving photographs of the dam from January of '25 show that, you know, that profile -- that drawing that was distributed after the disaster is not an as-built drawing. It's a much more slender profile. So this, you know, these are the issues that are there.

What happens, though, in the midst of especially the governor's commissioned report, they want to put this behind them. They -- it is resolved within a week, and what they determine is the collapse is defective foundations. They look to the west side -- and I won't get into the west side-east side here -- but it's a defective foundation. It's not the design. Because, if it was the design, that might call into question Boulder.

PATT MORRISON: Which is essentially the same principle.

DONALD JACKSON: That's right. It's the concrete curved gravity dam. But I will say this, Boulder was designed to a much higher standard. In that regard, Saint Francis was just really a -- I call it an architectural term "retardaire".

You know, if it had been built in 1910, then okay; but not by the mid 1920s. And in that article -- and that becomes really important to understand this issue of responsibility. I think it also gets at the issue of just how much Mulholland dominated the Bureau of Water Works and Supply essentially the Department of Water and Power.

PATT MORRISON: Well, it's sort of the engineering version of the great men theory of history. And then of course you bring to mind Donald Rumsfield's "Knowns, unknowns" which factor significantly into this.

We do set some time aside for questions, and this is the moment when we can do it. We have a couple of people with microphones in the audience who will look for you. If you raise your hands, we will try to get you as we talk about this.

First here. And then somebody over here. And then down in front here. Okay.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello. I wanted to ask what the agricultural repercussions were of this? And did Fillmore and Santa Paula ever recover from this disaster?

DONALD JACKSON: I'll take that. Yeah. The orchards got hit. It required restoration. If you go there today, well, what you're going to see in the Santa Clara Valley today is just the remnants of the floods from three or four years ago. There's sort of a natural flooding. There's debris.

Of course, the native trees have sort of clogged the waterways is different. Oh, but it definitely came back. You will not see evidence sort of agriculturally there. It's still, once you get into Ventura County, boy what a -- what a -- it's the sun kissed world the Limoneira Ranch and it was definitely able to come back.

PATT MORRISON: Over here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Topic, it's really interesting. Going back to the points that was -- were brought up earlier about progress being -- or I guess things in the future being better than things in the past, and then this attitude about conquering nature. I just wanted to know what you guys think going -- touching on something that's happening right now or could be happening in the future: The Keystone XL Pipeline. The region where it's being built it's a drought stricken area. If it happens, it could continue to ruin our environment, you know, the environmental complications. What do you guys have to say about that attitude?

PATT MORRISON: All right. Thank you. Rebecca, do you want to speak to that because it falls within your --

REBECCA SOLNIT: Sure. You know I work with Bill McKibben in 350.org, and I accept James Hanson's analysis on, you know --

PATT MORRISON: You make it sound like a religious doctrine that you've --

REBECCA SOLNIT: Well, you know, it's been treated as a religious doctrine --

PATT MORRISON: It has.

REBECCA SOLNIT: -- although its science. You know it's the religious doctrine that's against it. Because what climate change threatens more than anything else is big business. Because the current model of oil companies and some of the related titans of our country in particular are really, you know, threatened by it -- and they should be dismantled any way, but that's a different story. Where is Ida Tarbell when you need her?

You know James Hanson said it's game over for the climate if we complete the Keystone XL Pipeline and run all that incredibly goopy, low grade sludge through it. And it's really for fueling foreign countries.

What was really interesting, as we're starting to wind up the pre audience discussion -- I was also thinking about how much environmentalists regard dams as disasters and that breaking dams is something -- you know Earth First announced it's existence by running an image of a giant crack down Glen Canyon Damn. And there's been this kind of obsession with taking that dam in particular out. So it's interesting that we're here talking about the catastrophe when a damn ceased to exist, but the other catastrophes of when dams don't cease to exist.

PATT MORRISON: And this has been one of the great dividing points in the California legislature too. Where you have Democrats who talk about conservation and groundwater storage, and Republicans who talk about building, which is a paradox because you might have union people building those dams. So I've never really understood this.

We have another person here. Who else? Want to get a couple lined up while we're waiting.

>> Yes.

PATT MORRISON: Let's see, can we go over here. Oh, well. We won't forget you.

>> [Inaudible]

PATT MORRISON: All right. Up here near the top please first.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: In speaking about sort of the societal memory of these things and saying how it's true this -- the Saint Francis Dam is largely forgotten in LA, how would you compare that to our society memory of the Baldwin Hills Dam disaster which happened right here in the city?

PATT MORRISON: Bill?

WILLIAM DEVERELL: That's a great question, and I know only enough because I believe in that amnesia about Baldwin Hills disaster to say you're exactly right. There's a certain marginalization of that neighborhood, community, et cetera that's probably marginalized that memory. But I, to be perfectly honest, know no more than that.

PATT MORRISON: 62? 64?

>> 64.

>> 63.

[Multiple speakers]

PATT MORRISON: Split the difference --

DONALD JACKSON: Was it five people died?

PATT MORRISON: Right after the Kennedy assassination. So you know that may have contributed to it as well as the neighborhood.

DONALD JACKSON: Well you can go on eBay. Recently, there's a lot of press photos which I clicked through. You can buy them. As old media is cleaning out it's photo files [Multiple speakers talking] you can see it.

But five people, that's a wreck on the I-5. You know, that's a -- that happened. So we didn't have that dramatic thing. It certainly though captured the attention, but it was kind of like a community kind of gets washed out a little bit.

PATT MORRISON: And it doesn't challenge the ethnography as the Saint Francis Dam. We did have a question over. If we can get here and then get back across the room.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was just wondering what the impact of the dam --

PATT MORRISON: Can you put the mic closer to your mouth please.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes. I was just wondering about what the impact of the dam collapse was on the supply of water and it's effect on LA and it's growth. I mean we've talked a lot about the deaths, of course, which are very serious, but presumably this dam was holding back a lot of water that was really needed or --

PATT MORRISON: Okay. Let's --

DONALD JACKSON: Well it was an emergency supply. Actually I was just looking at that today. I was looking at Scattergood's testimony. The one to make the case. Because most -- the aqueduct was out of service for about two weeks. There was only that stretch between Powerhouse No. 2 and then going into the tunnel that then would go down to dry canyon. They had to get that rebuilt. They had it rebuilt within two weeks.

One of the reasons that Saint Francis was full, absolutely to the brim, was because all the reservoirs down stream were also full. So, you know, there was no crisis of water supply that came as a result.

PATT MORRISON: There's another question over here. Up there, excuse me.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay. I have a little bit of a lengthy comment and short question.

PATT MORRISON: Can you please make it less lengthy because a lot of people do --

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay. The comment is considering the turn out tonight and the interest in this topic, I'd really like to see come November a big turn out for the 100th anniversary of the Cascades. There's wonderful photos available. It looked like quite an event a hundred years ago.

Regardless of whether, you know, you appreciate the history of the dam and everything else, I think, you should appreciate that Los Angeles is what it is today because of what happen a hundred years ago at the Cascades.

PATT MORRISON: Right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Now question where'd the name come from Saint Francis; does anybody know?

DONALD JACKSON: Yeah, it's origins it was -- well it was San Francisco Rancho which is what the Newhall Ranch becomes. You're going from the Mexican era ranch -- I think it was a Mexican era ranch not a Spanish era -- when the Newhall family buys the ranch in the 1870's. Then it becomes Newhall because that's where the name Newhall comes from. So it's the little Saint Francis Creek. And then it just -- when they built the dam, they just sort of Anglicized it Saint Francis.

PATT MORRISON: I'm hoping to mark the 100th anniversary in November that Eric Garcetti will arrange to have David Copperfield make the water run back up hill to the Owen's Valley. [Laughter] That would be fun to watch.

We have another one here, and then where's our next one? Okay.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi there. I was wondering if you could just talk briefly about the sister dam of the Saint Francis Dam, the Mulholland Dam, and the public outcry after the flood; and the decision, from what I understand, to change the landscape of that dam, and it's kind of hidden away now.

WILLIAM DEVERELL: I can handle that. I will say now I'm going to promote my book that Norris and I are writing Heavy Ground were calling it. Because that -- in fact, I've looked at that issue. It figures in to the very end. You have the Mulholland Dam, what was originally called Weed Canyon sometimes called Hollywood Dam or the reservoir, which was right above Hollywood. That was built between 1923 and 1925. And at it's dedication, it's named after Mulholland. Back in the 20's it was common to name dams after the engineers like O'Shannassy Dam.

And it is interesting. Boy, you look at the inquest and you try to separate the design of the Weed Canyon Mulholland Dam from Saint Francis, you can't. Because it's like, well how'd you design Saint Francis? Well what we did at Weed Canyon was -- and then you just adapt it.

So after Saint Francis fails, well then you got all the people in Hollywood going uhhh what's going to happen here? [Laughter]

And two things -- well they do have --they would say don't worry the foundations are different. The most significant thing they do, from an engineering perspective, you drop the spillway level 31 feet. You reduce the capacity, and that becomes the most important thing. You know any dam's stability is dependent upon the water pressure placed upon it. You drop the spillway, you drop just how much water it can store. But that doesn't solve the problem for the people down stream.

In fact, I was just looking at the Engineer News Record had a wonderful little editorial of what happened called "The Psychological Problem". Psychologically people didn't want to look at it. So what happens is -- oh, Engineering News Record has a great picture of this, and it's going to be in the book, covering it over with Earth. And I use -- actually I use that as a symbol. Where its like after Mulholland dies, the issue was well they want to make a memorial for him. You can go to what Riverside and Los Feliz. There's a fountain. Then the comment: Why doesn't the dam stand as the monument? No, that doesn't happen. Whoo. No. So psychologically, you're right. They cover over it. There's just a little bit of concrete and now it's covered over with plants.

To me a sign that the fact that the Earth embankment that covers it over is not structural unless you plant it. If you have an earthen dam, you do not plant trees on the downstream side of the damn cause then you're gonna get seepage, infiltration. You're not going to do that. But there's that psychology you want to sort of -- I'd call it -- it's almost like try to remove it from the civic landscape. But psychology is really important when it comes to dams.

PATT MORRISON: Down here please.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You talked about, a little bit about, what made the dam fail, but you keep saying they were just trying to move on. So I was wondering if you could talk just a little bit more because I don't know the story of what technically made that dam fail. Was it water pressure against the --

PATT MORRISON: Okay.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: -- the dam.

PATT MORRISON: That's a good question.

DONALD JACKSON: No, it's an excellent one. If it was just me up here, that would be the first thing we'd start with. [Chuckling].

So what you have here and this is what also I've also learned to try to tell this without pictures -- this is something I learned very early on as a dam historian -- you try to talk about the history of dams without showing pictures, it becomes very difficult. Like what's a cutoff trench, DC? You know, what do you mean by grouting? What do you mean by...

But what happens is any gravity dam that stands by the fact that it's weight, you have to build up enough material in it so that it's just too dam heavy to push out of the way. Okay. And that's pretty easy to calculate. We know the weight of concrete. We know the weight of water. The tricky part is, though, what happens when water seeps into the foundation and then begins to push up or what is called "uplift". This becomes, because basically it's something that offsets the weight of the dam. There's many ways to deal with it: Drainage, grouting, cutoff trenches and that becomes important.

So that issue of raising the height of the dam also becomes important. Because ultimately the pressure that this dam has to hold back is dependent upon how much water is in it and then how much uplift there is. So the issues that come down early on, though, there was a lot of concern about the red conglomerate, which is on the west side --

PATT MORRISON: Which is the quality? Kind of rock?

DONALD JACKSON: The kind of rock. It's sandstone. And this is the one that many of you have probably heard: You can take it and put it into a tumbler of water and it will dissolve. And you know that's seen as that's the mechanism. There's a lot of questions that arise with that. Cause the dam didn't fail until -- it had been in service for almost two years; okay. But it was a really easy way of sort of -- or very simply characterizing this failure and defective foundations.

Whereas on the east side, you had this very hard mica shift. Something that's not going to crush, but it's fractured. And it has the ability for water to seep into it, and to provide a means for uplift acting against the base.

PATT MORRISON: In other words location, location, location.

DONALD JACKSON: Yeah and height and conditions and geology.

>> We have two more questions.

PATT MORRISON: Okay, over there.

DONALD JACKSON: We'll talk later.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So LA was reaching out to Colorado and various and the Owen's Valley and all those places, and San Francisco was reaching to Hetch Hetchy. And I'm just wondering if other cities were also reaching far out? And if the people who were responsible for doing this were like talking with each other at the Commonwealth Club or something like that?

DONALD JACKSON: The answer is yes. The cities are reaching out all across their landscapes in search of water and electricity especially and labor. So it's not the notion that LA is exceptional in this. LA may be a little more grandiose than other places, but other cities New York City, Denver are reaching far into landscapes. Do they talk to one another? You bet the civil engineers talk to each other. The professional organization of civil engineers is ripe and powerful unto today, but certainly in the 19 teens and 1920's.

And then the civic leaders, I'm not so sure the civic leaders talk to each other that much. But certainly the halls of power -- the congressional halls of power and the state and federal halls of Senate and congressional power -- there's a lot of discussion about this informed by particularly by the civil engineering profession. But not just civil engineers other engineers too.

PATT MORRISON: Our last question here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Speaking at the future and looking at the future, will it change? What have we learned, Rebecca, from that? Will the future be better having seen these disasters on both sides?

PATT MORRISON: This goes back to -- touches on our earlier problem.

REBECCA SOLNIT: The "we" problem. I'm not sure I can speak for we. I don't know. We're in such an interesting moment where it seems things are racing in both directions at once. There's a lot of really -- if you look at a country like Germany that's going more and more into renewable energy and appropriate technologies and things like that. And you look at some of the Republicans in Congress. And like, you know, human nature is broad and deep and weird. And running in a lot of directions at once is about all I can say about the future.

There's some interesting things being done. But specific to climate, the problem is so overwhelming that the response needs to be a hundred times what it is, you know, in so far as you can even call what we're doing in the US a response.

PATT MORRISON: It's now wine thirty [Laughter]

There will be book signing. There will be consorting in the courtyard with our guests, and so if you would thank them. And love your library, please.

[Applause]

ALOUD CATASTROPHE IN CALIFORNIA: A REAPPRAISAL OF THE ST. FRANCIS DAM COLLAPSE CAPTIONED BY TOTAL RECALL CAPTIONING, INC. WWW.YOURCAPTIONER.COM