St. Francis Dam - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 126

St. Francis Dam
Los Angeles would not have grown into the metropolis that it is today were it not for the expansion
of its water supply. In 1900, the city's population was about one hundred thousand and growing
rapidly, reaching 175,000 within five years. Since the Los Angeles River watershed was capable of
supporting only about two hundred thousand people, the city had the choice of limiting growth or
finding new sources of water. A drought in 1904 raised the issue to crisis proportions.
Los Angeles's need to import water had been foreseen a decade earlier by Fred Eaton, who as city
engineer had looked for alternative sources of water in the Sierra Nevadas and had identified the
Owens Valley, north of the city, as a likely candidate. In the meantime, the U.S. Reclamation Ser-
vice had begun looking into the feasibility of designing an irrigation scheme for the farmers of the
Owens Valley, and Los Angeles had to act fast if it was to obtain the water rights. Eaton took Willi-
am Mulholland, manager of the newly formed Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply, to
the valley to investigate the possibility of constructing a gravity-flow aqueduct from there to the city
nearly 250 miles south. The distance was unprecedented. The longest Roman aqueducts were less
than sixty miles long, and New York's Croton Aqueduct was even shorter. However, Owens Lake
was more than three thousand feet higher than the city, providing a much greater average gradient
than existed in the successful Croton Aqueduct. Thus, the engineering problems, which would in-
volve inverted siphons and pressure tunnels to get the water over and through the mountains in the
way, seemed solvable.
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 fifteen, landed in New York City four years
later, worked at a variety of jobs in the East and Midwest and then sailed via the Isthmus of Panama
to San Francisco. He settled in the Los Angeles area at the age of twenty-two, working as a “water
ditch tender” with the Los Angeles City Water Company, a small private provider. According to the
retrospective account by geological engineer J. David Rogers,
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 LeConte's Introduction to Physical Geology. Mulhol-
land liked the subject matter so much that he later recalled, “Right there I decided to become an
engineer.” . . . In the apprenticeship tradition of that era, he sought an increasingly technical work-
load and educated himself through reading.
Mulholland eventually became general manager and chief engineer of the water company. He
proved himself to be so knowledgeable about 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