William Mulholland

William Mulholland (born September 11, 1855, Belfast, Ireland [now in Northern Ireland]—died July 22, 1935, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) was a self-trained Irish-born American civil engineer who is best known for having created an effective means of supplying water to the semi-arid city of Los Angeles. He designed and supervised the construction (1904–13) of the Owens River–Los Angeles Aqueduct (now known as the Los Angeles Aqueduct), which diverted the Owens River in eastern California to transport fresh water from the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, southeast of Yosemite National Park, across the Mojave Desert and onto a spillway in the San Fernando Valley. The water was propelled entirely by gravity. The 233-mile- (375-km-) long aqueduct, at the time the world’s longest, was considered a modern engineering wonder and its designer a genius. Mulholland is also remembered for having overseen the construction (1925–26) of the St. Francis Dam, located about 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles, which suddenly collapsed in 1928, resulting in massive flooding and the deaths of at least 450 people.

Mulholland’s mother died when he was seven years old, and his father remarried three years later. At age 14 Mulholland ran away from home and went to sea for the first time after suffering a severe beating by his father for his poor grades at school. In 1870, after returning home for a brief period, he joined the British merchant marine, spending the next four years on cross-Atlantic voyages on the merchant ship Glennifer. In 1874, after sailing to New York City, Mulholland left the ship and the merchant marine. He worked various odd jobs in Michigan and Ohio—where he met his older brother Hugh—and Pennsylvania. In 1876 Mulholland and his brother secretly followed their uncle and his family, who had been living in Pittsburgh and were moving to Los Angeles, onto a cruise ship headed toward Panama. The stowaways were discovered before the end of the trip and were forced to work on the ship for the rest of the voyage. Abandoned in Panama by their uncle and cousins, who took another ship to the United States, the brothers secured work on other ships headed north, eventually making their way to San Francisco. There they began a journey to Los Angeles on horseback, arriving early in 1877. Soon afterward Mulholland was hired by the Los Angeles City Water Company, then a private firm controlling the distribution of water in the city. Over the next two decades, he worked his way up from a ditch digger to superintendent of the water company and later of city’s new municipal water department (later called the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power) in 1902. Mulholland became a U.S. citizen in 1886.

With Los Angeles facing an inadequate water supply after a drought from 1892 to 1904, Mulholland developed a plan to transfer most of the water flowing in the Owens River by means of the city’s first aqueduct. At a formal dedication ceremony in 1913, Mulholland famously declared, “There it is. Take it.” Although the aqueduct benefited Los Angeles, allowing the city’s economy and population to grow rapidly during the next decade, it greatly harmed the inhabitants of Owens River Valley, including farmers, ranchers, and small-town residents, whose livelihoods depended on the river’s steady water supply. Mulholland’s plan for the aqueduct was kept secret from the valley’s population until the city had acquired all the necessary property and water rights through purchases by a prosperous businessman, former Los Angeles mayor Frederick Eaton. The aqueduct naturally engendered enormous hostility among those who viewed themselves as victims of water theft, leading some of them to attempt to destroy the aqueduct with dynamite.

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In the early 1920s Mulholland turned his attention to the need for a large reservoir for the water transported through the Los Angeles Owens River Aqueduct. The associated dam was constructed in the St. Francisquito Canyon. As the reservoir was filled, several cracks and leaks were observed in the dam and its abutments, but Mulholland dismissed them as normal. After the reservoir was filled to capacity for the first time on March 7, 1928, he inspected the dam and proclaimed it safe. On the morning of March 12, a dam keeper observed a leak of muddy water, an apparent indication that the dam’s foundation was being eroded. When Mulholland and his assistant examined the leak on the same day, however, the water was clear. About 12 hours later, shortly before midnight, the dam’s massive concrete wall collapsed, sending 12.4 billion of gallons of water rushing down the canyon toward the Pacific Ocean. 

Mulholland was not held criminally responsible for the dam’s failure, but his public reputation was ruined, and he later resigned his post. During a coroner’s inquest beginning in March, Mulholland accepted full responsibility for the disaster, stating, “don’t blame anyone else, you just fasten it on me.” At another point in the inquest, he said, “the only ones I envy about this thing are the ones who are dead.” The St. Francis dam disaster remains one of the worst civil-engineering failures in American history.