In their coverage yesterday, The Signal had a great picture of the Powerhouse Fire burning brush near the LA Aqueduct pipes, the 12 foot diameter pipes that run all the way from the Owens Valley through the mountains and into Santa Clarita before terminating at the famous Sylmar Cascades in the Newhall Pass.
They ought to call this fire the Mulholland Blaze
There's a lot of history up there, burning up in smoke. And it's all tied around one Irish immigrant, William Mulholland and the empire he built as head of Los Angeles DWP, an empire both intimately and disastrously tied to the Santa Clarita Valley and San Francisquito Canyon.
Construction of the Aqueduct began in 1908 after sophisticated Angelenos, including Mulholland, essentially tricked farmers and land owners in the Owens Valley on the eastern slope of the Sierras, to sell water rights from the then beautiful Owens Lake, which is now a dry, and salted moonscape.
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Mulholland took over from there. Within just five years, the DWP leader -who had no formal engineering education- and some 5,000 men built a water conveyance system that used gravity to take water from the Owens Valley and present it to the doorstep of Los Angeles, via San Francisquito Canyon, Saugus, and Newhall. And he generated electricity along the way, all via gravity! You drive over the pipes he laid when you drive north of Central Park on Bouquet Canyon, and you can see his pipes again along Centre Pointe Parkway & Golden Valley. In fact, it was 100 years ago -November 5 to be precise- when William Mulholland, who the Times back then called the "Hero of the Day", stood at the foot of Sylmar Cascades and said his famous words. Let me let the Times take over from here:
"This is a great event, fraught with the greatest importance to the future prosperity of this city," he began, silencing the gathering. "You have given me an opportunity to create a great public enterprise, and I am here to render my account to you. The aqueduct is completed and it is good. No one knows better than I how much we needed the water. We have the fertile lands and the climate. Only water was needed to make of this region a tremendously rich and productive empire, and now we have it."
With the niceties out of the way, the chief unfurled a large American flag as the signal to open the aqueduct gates. Cannons boomed as all eyes stared up the spillway. For a few painful minutes, nothing happened. Skeptics had called the aqueduct $23-million lunacy at best; at worst, they thought it a get-rich scheme by greedy land speculators. Among those whom they included in their criticism was The Times' owner and editor, Gen. Harrison Gray Otis. When the water did not instantly appear, no doubt some in the assembled crowd wondered: Could it be?
Then it flowed. Photographs show the leading edge of the wave stained black with the accumulated dust of construction. But soon the torrent flowed clean, and as children waded in and frolicked, Mulholland turned to the mayor and choked out his most famous sound bite: "There it is. Take it."
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And take it they did. The City of Los Angeles, rather than growing denser and being limited by its own natural aquifers, grew out to meet the empire-building stream of endless, free water. That set a pattern of development that continues to this day, and one which California would copy decades later with its own California Water Project that, unlike Mulholland's, uses a lot of electricity but makes life possible in a place like the SCV.Of course Mulholland's glory and fame wouldn't last much longer. In 1928, a dam he constructed in San Francisquito Canyon collapsed, spilling billions of gallons of water down the canyon, into the SCV area, and out to the ocean via Piru, Fillmore, and Ventura. The St. Francis Dam disaster (chunks of the cement are still there today) was the second worst disaster in California at that time, killing 500+ people, second only to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Mulholland was ruined.
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I once rode my bike around the entire Bouquet/Spunky Canyon/San Francisquito loop. It's such an interesting area; Bouquet Canyon is dense and lush with vegetation and, a creek that seems to run all year, and amazing stone and wooden houses set back in the forrest. I remember one vivid scene from riding my bike up Bouquet Canyon that day: a large, shirtless and white-bearded man, sitting on his porch, smoking what appeared and smelled to be marijuanna, and blasting the Grateful Dead, complete with a DeadHead flag hanging over his porch. Image not recoveredP1010058.JPG
By the time I rounded the loop, made the tortuous climb up Spunky Canyon, I was ready to eat in Green Valley, an odd little hamlet, so far from Los Angeles and the rest of the world. They get cyclists and motorcyclists all the time in Green Valley, but not much else seems to go on there. I didn't stay long because I was looking forward to the long downhill ride on San Francisquito Canyon, which couldn't be more different than Bouquet Canyon. Dry, sparse, wide ranging, with epic views, San Francisquito canyon is both beautiful and utilitarian in that so much of what we depend on -water and electricity- runs through it.
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Of course I made stops along the way, shot pictures of Mullholland's pipes which even now could be under threat of fire, and observed a moment at the plaque commemorating the St. Francis disaster, and then stared at DWP Power Station 2 in amazement. This fire may be burning outside the SCV technically, but it's chewing through a landscape that is historic and vital for our entire region. It's consuming the site of Mulholland's greatest achievement and his most epic failure. We should call it the Mulholland Blaze.
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