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ENGINEERING
Mulholland Drive
William Mulholland was an engineer of the old
school, which essentially means that he had learned
by doing. He was born in Ireland in 1855, went to
sea at 15, landed in New York City four years later,
worked at a variety of jobs in the East and Midwest, and sailed via the Isthmus of Panama to San
Francisco. He settled in the Los Angeles area at the
age of 22, working as a water ditch tender with
the Los Angeles City Water Company, a small private provider. According to one account:
Henry Petroski is A. S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a
professor of history at Duke University. Address: Box 90287,
Durham, NC 27708-0287.
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Mulholland later recalled that he became interested in things technical when serving as
a helper on a drill rig digging water wells
that pierced a buried tree trunk at a depth of
600 feet. He went to the library to investigate the manner by which a tree could become buried at such great depth, and read
University of California Professor John
LeContes Introduction to Physical Geology.
Mulholland liked the subject matter so
much that he later recalled, Right there I
decided to become an engineer.
Mulholland eventually became general manager
and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Water Company. He proved himself to be so knowledgeable of
the poorly documented infrastructure and workings of the water distribution system that, when
the company was acquired by the city in 1902, the
self-taught engineer was retained as its manager. It
was in this capacity that he accompanied Fred
Eaton to the Owens Valley and secured $1.5 million
from the Los Angeles Board of Water Commissioners for engineering studies of the situation.
The scale of the project and Mulhollands lack
of substantive experience in constructing such facilities were used by other engineers, newspaper editors and electric power interests to discredit the scheme. In response to the criticism, the
City Commissioners appointed an Aqueduct Advisory Board, comprising three distinguished consulting engineers, to make an independent evaluation of the proposed aqueduct design. One of
the consultants was John R. Freeman, who had
been among the principal designers of the New
Croton Aqueduct and who had served on the advisory board to review the design of the Panama
Canal. When the external board found Mulhollands aqueduct design admirable in conception
and outline, criticism was quelled. The $23 million bond issue passed overwhelmingly in 1907.
The construction of the 233-mile aqueduct and
its initial filling were not without incident. Upon
first carrying water, one of the major siphons in
the aqueduct began leaking and was lifted up by
the resulting hydraulic forces. The seepage from
the riveted steel conduit also triggered a landslide in which the pipe became entangled. Such
setbacks were forgotten by most of the 30,000
people who gathered on November 5, 1913, to
Figure 1. St. Francis dam impounded 38,000 acre-feet of water prior to its failure on March 12, 1928. (Photograph by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.)
watch the opening of the worlds longest aqueduct, which was capable of transporting 258 million gallons per day to Los Angeles.
While the aqueduct was being planned, speculators bought up large parcels of land in the San Fernando Valley, located north of Los Angeles. Water
from the aqueduct would make the semi-arid region arable, they anticipated, but when it became
clear that no such water would ever be made available outside of Los Angeles, the San Fernando
landowners argued for annexation. By 1924, their
successful campaign had quadrupled the area of
the city. This growth, combined with a three-year
drought, severely taxed the water supply. Under
the worst conditions, ranchers in the San Fernando
Valley were intercepting virtually all of the aqueducts base flow. The city of Los Angeles sought to
acquire more water rights in the Owens Valley, but
angry residents, still bitter from the original conflict
over the claims of the rural valley versus a growing
city, balked, and some turned to violence reminiscent of the Old West. Among the retaliatory acts
was the dynamiting of the aqueduct, which subsequently had to be protected by armed guards.
Storage to Stretch Supply
In the meantime, in recognition of the fact that the
aqueduct could not supply enough water for both
urban Los Angeles and the rural San Fernando
Valley without enormous storage capacity, additional reservoirs had been planned and designed
and were under construction. In fact, between 1920
and 1926, a total of eight new reservoirs were built
by the Los Angeles Bureau of Waterworks and
Supply, during which time Mulholland made it
known that it was his goal to have enough reservoir capacity to hold in reserve an entire years
worth of water for the city. Among the additional
reservoirs Mulholland planned was one that
would account for about half the total water required. This dam, to be located in San Francisquito
Canyon, was to be called the St. Francis.
The St. Francis Dam site was chosen after inflated land values made another location too ex-
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