Infamous New Year’s Day Flood, Los Angeles Basin, 1934

The 1934 flood disaster in Los Angeles basin was so horrific that Woody Guthrie composed a song called “Los Angeles New Year’s Flood” to memorialize the hundred people who were buried alive, drowned, or never found. Light rain began falling on December 30, 1933, and rapidly intensified to a downpour totaling 7.31 inches in 24 hours. This amount of rain qualified as the heaviest 24-hour rainfall yet documented (in 1934) by the local US Weather Bureau (rainfall measurement began in 1877). (1) By midnight on December 31, 1934, the San Gabriel Mountains, towering above the Los Angeles basin, began to discharge massive debris flows of mud, rocks and trees down dozens of steep narrow canyons. The debris flows reached the basin floor as 20-foot walls of water, as they had done for eons. (2)

Upon reaching the basin floor the colossal debris flows buried 200 houses and rendered another 400 uninhabitable. Also buried were around 800 mostly Model “A” cars in Montrose, La Crescenta, and other foothill communities in the narrow La Canada Valley between the San Gabriel and Verdugo Mountains. Five people were killed at a New Year’s Eve party in a Montrose home buried by debris flow; ten bodies were pulled from a debris flow in La Crescenta; and 25 men, women, and children were drowned at the Red Cross headquarters at the American Legion Hall at Montrose Boulevard and La Crescenta when a wall of water tore open the building. (1,3) The Los Angeles County coroner collected around 40 bodies and noted 75 people missing by January 4, 1934. (4) The destruction was so complete that three years after the disaster, 45 persons remained unaccounted for.

For days after the disaster, thousands of civilian workers dug for survivors and corpses in the mantle of mud covering streets and homes in the foothill towns. Roads were strewn with boulders and debris making access difficult. Some bridges had suddenly given way, plunging carloads of doomed people into the swollen and torrential Los Angeles River. Ironically, the Los Angeles Times newspaper delivered a promotional insert on January 2, 1934, cheerfully describing the beauty of the foothill cities where “olive-canning and berry-raising” were the chief industries, and some of the most beautiful homes and estates in all Los Angeles were located. (5)

Flood control planners had warily observed the build-up of these foothill communities during the 1920s, had proposed construction of debris basins in the canyons above La Canada Valley to mitigate the effects of the debris flows, and had watched the referendum go down to defeat in 1926. Eight years later following the 1934 New Year’s Day Flood, Chief County Flood Control Engineer E.C. Eaton again urged the LA County Board of Supervisors to construct “debris basins and permanent protective works in watercourse areas adjacent to the water shed of Los Angeles county.” (6) Meanwhile, Los Angeles city and county officials on January 2, 1934 appealed to the federal government for funds for reconstruction and rehabilitation work in the flood-stricken Le Crescenta and Montrose, among other areas (more below). (7)

The disastrous New Year’s Day debris flow was a turning point in the history of the Los Angeles basin. It focused national attention on the flood problem in Southern California and helped shape the future direction of flood control efforts. The 1934 flood event marked the point in California’s history when the federal government took over management of Southern California’s flood control efforts (more below). (2) 

The Geology of the Great Los Angeles Basin

The Los Angeles basin is a group of four alluvial plains named the San Gabriel Valley, Inland Valley, San Fernando Valley, and Coastal Plain. The plains are surrounded (more or less) by three mountain ranges named the Santa Monica Mountains, the San Gabriel Mountains, and the Santa Ana Mountains. Of the three ranges, the San Gabriel is by far the greatest, with peaks over 10,000 feet, just 40 or 50 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean.

Around 20 million years ago, most of Los Angeles County was under Pacific Ocean water. The Palos Verdes Hills peninsula was an offshore island. The Santa Monica Mountains that now protrude upward between Santa Monica Bay and the San Fernando Valley did not exist. The San Gabriel Mountains that now project between the Los Angeles basin and the Mohave Desert did not exist. It was all Pacific Ocean as far as a dinosaur’s eyes could see.

The San Gabriel Mountains orogeny (mountain building) spanned around 40 million years (25-65 million years ago) before accelerating in the past 1 million years. (2) The San Gabriels are young mountains and are still rising as rapidly as any mountain range in the world. (8) The San Gabriels rose next to a spectacular trough plunging six miles below sea level. Riddled with faults, the San Gabriels have long fractured easily and crumbled in the face of Pacific Ocean storms. The San Gabriels continue to disintegrate at one of the fastest rates in the world, but they are building up faster than they are disintegrating.

For the past million years, every storm blowing in from the Pacific Ocean has stalled at the San Gabriels, releasing precipitation as rain and snow. Some of the most concentrated rainfall ever recorded in the US has occurred in the San Gabriel Mountains. During such storms, the mountain soils quickly saturate. When slope saturation points have been reached, massive debris flows have started off the mountains, scouring deep canyons, and shooting out into the Los Angeles basin or its predecessor trough.   

Repeated San Gabriel debris flows over the past million years have filled the trough with boulders, gravel, sand, and silt, and have created the level floor of the current Los Angeles basin. The accumulation of thick sediments in the trough formed a porous meshwork that has held underground water (aquifer) in the Los Angeles basin. The rainwater that flows down the mountain canyons quickly disappears into the sands of the alluvial plains at the junction between the foothills and the basin. This phenomenon of underground river flow means that no single deep river channel has ever developed for the Los Angeles River (yes, there is one) or the other two major rivers in the Los Angeles basin--the San Gabriel and the Santa Ana. Only during major storms has the nearly 300 square miles of natural underground reservoir filled up and forced water flow to the surface where it has spread out in shallow, poorly defined channels that whip back and forth across the alluvial plains on their way to the Pacific Ocean. Whenever a storm dumped enough rain within a short enough period of time, the entire Los Angeles basin could become a transient lake with a quicksand bottom.   

San Fernando Valley: An Offshoot of the Los Angeles Basin Proper

The Los Angeles River originates in the San Fernando Valley (elevation 700 feet above sea level). Most of the water that cascades down the slopes of the San Gabriels into the San Fernando Valley disappears underground in the San Gabriel foothills. Some of the water may reappear above ground in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains on the other side of the San Fernando Valley. The reason for the water’s reemergence is that the roots of the Santa Monica Mountains go deep into the Los Angeles basin and block the natural subterranean reservoir’s outlet to the ocean. The water that emerges from the natural underground reservoir forms the Los Angeles River. The river tracks eastward along the north base of the Santa Monica Mountains, curves around the eastern end of the range at Griffith Park, and then heads south through the city of Los Angeles (elevation 300 feet) to Long Beach (elevation 0 feet) where it empties into the Pacific Ocean.

Franciscan Priests Choose the Los Angeles River for Farming

Franciscan priests in the 1780s christened the Los Angeles River “Rio de Porciuncula” (little portion) after the tiny chapel in Italy where St. Francis of Assisi received a divine revelation and started the Franciscan order. The fertile plains of the Los Angeles basin encountered by these men reminded them of the Mediterranean region (dry most of the time, torrential downpours sometimes—cataclysmic cycles, no big deal) of their youth. They established an agricultural village—the El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles—near the Los Angeles River on September 4, 1781. The new pueblo was 15 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. The village had no port, coal, iron, or timber. Its purpose was to grow food, including grapes to make wine, for the staff of California missions and presidios (military forts), which were erected up and down the coast from 1769-1777 to defend the territory for the Spain.

Before the arrival of the Europeans to the Los Angeles basin, the Gabrielino Native Americans (named after Mission San Gabriel—what they called themselves is not recorded) inhabited the plain. Archeological evidence suggests that humans inhabited the basin for about 10,000 years before the arrival of the Franciscans. At the time of European contact, more than 5,000 Gabrielino lived in Southern California, spread among perhaps 50-100 villages called “rancherias”, which they located near the region’s waterways but on high ground. “The Indian preference for settlement sites on high ground at a distance from the rivers at first puzzled early Anglo settlers, who had to learn firsthand the nefarious nature of streams in the arid West.” (9) The Gabrielino understood the importance of the region’s waterways but also knew their dangers.

When California joined the US in 1848, a steady influx of European settlers to the Los Angeles basin began. In the city’s first decade, the population of the agricultural town of Los Angeles, located on a terrace overlooking the Los Angeles River, tripled. Farms occupied around 1,500 acres of the city. Unlined uncovered irrigation ditches called “zanjas” branched off of the mother zanja to irrigate fields of corn and vegetables, orchards, and pasture for livestock. The zanjas became increasingly unsanitary as all sorts of debris, including corpses, found their way into the ditches. By 1853 many residents were receiving their daily water supply via subscription from water carriers.

The Los Angeles City Water Company was founded shortly thereafter and flourished for the next 30 years. “Its most important initial decision was to build its diversion on the river farther upstream from previous dams, at a higher elevation than the town site, thus eliminating the need for fragile water wheels and flumes that had proven susceptible to damage from floods,” according to Gumprecht. (10) By 1880, around 5,000 acres in Los Angeles were irrigated with river water, and another 3,500 acres outside of Los Angeles were irrigated with the city’s zanjas.

The city of Los Angeles had exclusive right to tap the water of the Los Angeles River, which created a problem for farmers in San Fernando Valley who instead attempted to access the aquifers beneath the valley floor. As the Los Angeles basin’s population grew after the arrival of the transcontinental railroads and the annexation of new communities, the Los Angeles River could no longer support the basin’s needs. Construction of so-called “infiltration galleries”, such as the Headworks Deep Gallery, beneath the river captured the river’s subsurface flow before it even reached the surface.

Los Angeles-Owens River Aqueduct

City and county officials found an ingenious solution to Los Angeles’ water problem: the water in the Owens Valley on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada range more than 200 miles from Los Angeles. The Owens Valley captured the flows of around 40 snow-fed mountain streams that drained the steep eastern side of the Sierras, including Mount Whitney, which, at 14,500 feet, is the tallest mountain in the continental US. The clear waters ended in Owens Lake, which was salty and had no natural outlet. The stream waters were captured into an aqueduct before they reached the lake.

Starting in May 1908 construction of the Los Angeles-Owens River Aqueduct began and, on November 5, 1913, thousands of spectators applauded the arrival of the first water carried by the aqueduct as it shot out of the tunnel cut through the mountains and into a reservoir built on the north side of the San Fernando Valley. (11) The aqueduct was extended 105 miles to near Mono Lake, another salty terminal lake whose inflowing waters were captured before they reached the lake and drained toward Los Angeles in a second aqueduct. “Today,” notes Gumprecht, “runoff form the eastern Sierras that is carried to Los Angeles through the various aqueducts supplies about 40 percent of the city’s water.” (11) A second aqueduct was constructed from the Colorado River to Southern California in the 1940s. (12)

The Los Angeles Riverbed Degrades

With so little water in its bed, the Los Angeles River filled with rubbish, sewage and transients including some poor Okie migrants escaping the Dust Bowl disaster of the 1930s. The shallow river bed became a sand-and-gravel quarry in some places. In the 1930s, urban designers Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (son of America’s most famous park builder) and Harland Bartholomew, developed plans to return the river to “a line of beauty”. The most serious question in any plan of improvement, “ they said, “will necessarily be that of providing satisfactory and effective revetments or other forms of river control without seriously injuring the landscape value of the river bed.” (13) Their plans “sunk like a stone” for the same reasons earlier efforts to create parks and beautify Los Angeles had failed: “It was overly ambitious and dependent for its execution on a regional parks agency that did not exist. The huge $230.1 million price tag was seven times the entire budget of the city of Los Angeles in 1930.” (13) Interestingly, the plans developed by Olmsted and Bartholomew are receiving more attention today than when they were first printed 75 years ago.

Decades of Repeated Floods and Feeble Attempts at Flood Control

Gumprecht describes the numerous devastating floods of the Los Angeles River. As a result of a serious flood in 1914, flood control projects began, which involved numerous attempts to construct dams and reservoirs to hold mountain runoff. Often local referenda to pay for the construction were voted down. Flood control planners lacked the resources of private developers and the legal authority to prevent construction of homes in flood-prone areas such as Montrose and La Crescenta.

One flood control engineer lamented in 1919 that “A decision would be made by the chief engineer that a dam was needed in one canyon or another, that protection work was needed at another point, and a survey party would go out and take some topography. Then the chief engineer or perhaps the chief designer in the office would decide how high the dam should be, not based on record hydrology, but just on what the physical aspects of the ground would seem to indicate. And the result was that the works that were installed were not interrelated at all, but were constructed generally at the point of greatest need.” (14)

LA Flood Control District and the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works

Tight-lipped E.C. Eaton became chief engineer of the Los Angeles Flood Control District in 1930. Over the next four years, he developed the first comprehensive flood control plan for Los Angeles County. The plan called for construction of dams, basins, stream channels, spreading grounds, and debris flow basins in canyons throughout the San Gabriels. It also called for the immediate construction of concrete levees along 11 miles of the 51-mile long Los Angeles River and digging an entirely new channel for the river that was to be 50 feet wide and 5 feet deep. A lack of funds delayed implementation of the multi-faceted plan.

An application by Los Angeles County officials to fund the plan to the fledgling Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works (FEAPW) in 1933 requesting $34.7 million in grants and loans was rejected. (15) The FEAPW was established by executive order (EO 6174) penned by President Franklin Roosevelt on June 16, 1933, just three months after his first inauguration on March 4, 1933. The purpose of the FEAPW was to prepare a comprehensive public works program. The FEAPW was later renamed PWA and placed under the Federal Works Agency, which coordinated federal public works activities under a reorganization plan that became effective on July 1, 1939. The PWA was abolished in 1943. (16)

Without major funding, new work in Los Angeles County flood control nearly ground to a halt. Local workers plugged holes in existing levees and dug deeper stream channels. By December 1933, just days before the infamous New Years Flood, 86 percent of stream channels in the flood control district remained without levees or other permanent protections. (15) Meanwhile construction of the foothill communities, such as Montrose, Tujunga, Sunland, and La Crescenta—all built in the worst possible locations at the foot of canyons—forged ahead. It was only a matter of time before a strong storm would threaten their existence.

Fallout from the New Year’s Day Flood 1934

In the days after the New Year’s Flood on January 1, 1934, LA County’s Chief Engineer E.C. Eaton was understandably apoplectic. He blamed the disaster on the defeat of the 1926 bond issue mentioned above, which would have provided $2.4 million for flood control construction in the area where damages were greatest. (16) He said, “In no case where permanent types of protection work were installed was serious damage experienced.” (17) For his efforts, the public turned against him, blaming him for the failure of flood control. He resigned in August 1934.

In the fall of 1934, the desperate LA County Board of Supervisors placed a $26.3 million local bond issue on the ballot to fund emergency improvements in the foothills and numerous other projects similar to those that the voters had handily rejected in 1926 (see above). The funds were meant for constructing 1) 12 “debris basins” in the La Canada Valley to capture debris flows before they reached the communities located there; 2) concrete channels to carry water from the debris basins to the Los Angeles basin; and 3 levees along the entire river. Again the citizens of LA defeated the measure by a 4 percent margin. (17)

The Federal Government Takes Over Flood Control in LA County

With the failure of the local referendum, the LA County supervisors again turned to Washington where they requested $19.3 million from the federal government under the “Emergency Relief Appropriation Act”, a Depression-era recovery program created by the US Congress. This act had been passed in April 1935 and granted President Roosevelt $5 billion with which to implement relief programs and government employment programs. (18) Interestingly, a presidential committee had already endorsed the comprehensive plan created by E.C. Eaton in March 1934, which carried a price tag of around $100 million and included 64 separate projects, according to Gumprecht.

In July 1935, President Roosevelt allocated $13.9 million in Works Progress Administration (WPA) funds to finance 14 of the most pressing projects in Eaton’s comprehensive plan. LA County provided $3.5 million to purchase land needed for the projects, as homes had been built all along the Los Angeles River directly in its flood plain. All work was placed under the US Army Corps of Engineers and was to be carried out by unemployed local laborers on WPA relief rolls. (19) Most of the relief funds went to improving channels and constructing debris basins at the openings of San Gabriel canyons. The US Congress in July also funded a preliminary examination of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers and their tributaries by the US Army Corps of Engineers as prelude to a federally-funded LA County flood control program.

The Flood Control Act of 1936

In 1936 the US Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1936, which greatly expanded the role of the US Army Corps of Engineers in addressing the nation’s flooding problems. In the 1930s, flood control was conceptualized as the “use of large, expensive, and environmentally intrusive physical structures.” (20). Neither Congress nor the Corps paid much attention to alternative approaches common today, such as flood warning systems, flood insurance, flood plain information programs, and procedures to discourage new building development on flood plains.  

The 1936 Flood Control Act identified 50 flood control projects nationwide and Los Angeles County flood control was one of them. Indeed, Los Angeles County received more money than any other project in the nation. An additional $70 million  was provided for Los Angeles County projects, which calculated to almost one-fourth of the total federal expenditures under the act. Although the Corps initially used Eaton’s original comprehensive plan, problems were identified. In December 1936, US Army Major Theodore Wyman submitted his own recommendations for controlling the Los Angeles River. His approach involved construction of 1) debris basins, 2) large flood control basins, and 3) stream channels both deepened and lined with beauteous re-enforced concrete to enable floodwaters to be transported to the ocean as quickly as possible. (21)

Federal flood control work had barely begun when the most damaging flood in the history of Los Angeles County struck in March 1938.

Summary

Human settlement of the Los Angeles basin, which began to increase dramatically after California became a state in 1848, has continuously outstripped the ability of the rivers and the Mediterranean terrain and climate to provide for the perceived water needs of residents. Various solutions, such as aqueducts collecting run-off from the Sierra Nevada, have been implemented to meet the expanding need for water at the time it is needed. But controlling the water when it wasn’t needed—that is, during storms that produced flooding--was a continual problem that local government could not solve, particularly during the Great Depression when money was tight.

As a result of the 1934 New Year’s Flood, which buried some foothill communities, desperate LA County supervisors approached the federal government for assistance. Money was forthcoming under certain conditions, which included transferring flood control of Los Angeles County to the US Army Corps of Engineers, employing workers on relief rolls, and redrafting the comprehensive flood control plan for the region. The huge flood control construction projects typical of the Army Corps of Engineers’ design work in the 1930s had barely gotten underway  when the biggest deluge ever to inundate LA County occurred in March 1938. 

Sources:

1. “Thirty-seven on death list in record 8.27-inch deluge: Upward of Thirty-five Injured During Downpour, Thousands of Men Put to Work Removing Wreckage Left in Wake of Torrents”, Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1934, p. 1. Available at: http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/393114841.html?dids=393114841:
393114841&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:AI&type= historic&date=Jan+2%2C+1934&author=&pub=Los+Angeles+Times+(1886-
Current+File)&edition=&startpage=1&desc=THIRTY-SEVEN+ON+DEATH+LIST+IN+RECORD+8.27-INCH+DELUGE; accessed May 24, 2006.

2. Blake Gumprecht: “The Los Angeles River”, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2001, p. 205.

3. “Five Guest Die as Flood Ends Party” in Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1934, p. 7. “Death which rode the brackish overflow waters of Verdugo Wash brought to a tragic end a gay New Year’s Eve party given at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Hesse of 2361 Manhatan street, Montrose.” Available at: http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes /access/
393115151.html?dids=393115151:39311515 1&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:AI&type=historic&date=Jan+2%2C+1934&
author=&pub=Los+Angeles+Times+(1886-Current+File)&edition=&startpage=7
&desc=Five+Guests+Die+as+Flood+Ends+Party; accessed May 24, 2006.

4. Blake Gumprecht, pp. 11-13.

5. “Los Angeles County” in Los Angeles Time, Jan. 2, 1934, p. E11.

6. “Storm Lesson Pointed Out: Engineer Eaton Says Debris Basin Construction Imperative to Prevent Future Catastrophes.” Los Angeles Times, January 6, 1934, p. a1. Available at: http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/393128201.html?dids=393128201:393128201&FMT=ABS&
FMTS=ABS:AI &type= historic&date=Jan+6%2C+1934&author=&pub=Los+Angeles+Times+(1886-
Current+File)&edition=&startpage=A1&desc= STORM+LESSON+POINTED+OUT; accessed May 24, 2006.

7. “Los Angeles Sends Urgent Plea to Washington for Relief of Flood-Stricken Area” in Los Angeles Times, January 3, 1934, p. A8. Available at: http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/393120361.html?dids=393120361:393120361&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:AI
&typ e=historic&date=Jan+3%2C+1934&author=&pub=Los+Angeles+Times+(1886-Current&edition=&startpage=
A8&desc= Los+Angeles+Sends+Urgent+Plea+to+Washington+for+Relief+of+Flood-Stricken+Area; accessed May 24, 2006.

8. John McPhee: “The Control of Nature”, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 1989, p. 184.

9. Blake Gumprecht, pp. 26-35.

10. Ibid, p. 68.

11. Ibid, p. 105.

12. Ibid, p. 118.

13. Ibid, p. 268.

14. Ibid, p. 199.

15. Ibid, p. 202.

16. “Records of the Public Works Administration [PWA]” at:  

 http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/135.html; accessed May 30, 2006.

17. Blake Gumprecht, p. 205.

18. “The Great Depression” chronology at:  http://www.sparknotes.com/history/american/depression/htimeline.html; accessed May 30, 2006.

19. Blake Gumprecht, p. 206.

20. “Flood Control Act of 1936” at: http://www.usace.army.mil/inet/usace-docs/eng-pamphlets/ep870-1-29/c-6.pdf; accessed May 30, 2006.

21. Blake Gumprecht, p. 208.