Not Just Kilowatts: Dams are Instruments of Power

You’d think Los Angeles’s mountain dams ran on water, yet this couldn't be farther from the truth.

Big Creek ran on labor power: thousands of workers were forced to endure disease outbreaks, brutal mountains, systematic discrimination, all this while building the greatest engineering wonder of the time.

St. Francis Dam ran on ego: Mulholland wanted to see his vision, a self-sufficient LA, through, even if it meant ignoring geologists who warned the ground wouldn't hold. When the dam collapsed, it killed; arguably the most catastrophic effect professional ambition had on public safety in recent times.

Morris Dam ran on war: Sometime in 1941, the reservoir was secretively repurposed into a Navy weapons lab run by Caltech. With that, civilian infrastructure became another military tool.

LA's dams generated more than kilowatts. They generated control, ambition, and weaponry. Enforced it, even. Infrastructure designed to power homes instead powered very different agendas.

The above photographs encapsulate the brutality of Los Angeles's electrification, where, between 1910 and 1916, thousands of workers carved roads, tunnels, and substations from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to build Henry Huntington's Big Creek Hydroelectric Project, soon known as "the hardest-working water in the world," (“Big Creek Hydroelectric Project”) though the water did not do much of the work.

The project was a huge success with construction wrapping up in 3 years, generating 1,000 megawatts of hydroelectric power for 11 million Californians (Hanson), but success came at a cost that did not make it into newspapers: a typhoid outbreak sickened hundreds of workers living in remote mountain camps; Chinese laborers, employed as laundrymen and cooks, were relegated to third-class status and denied basic dignities; not to mention the project proceeded without competitive bidding, built entirely under Southern California Edison's control (Hanson).

These images show what the mainstream narrative omits: the backbreaking labor of moving earth on horseback with primitive tools, the dangerous mountain terrain, the isolation of construction sites. The men visible here are the reason behind LA's electrical grid today: the so-called “hardest-working water” that carved out mountains.

Morris Dam rose up in 1934 to do one thing: hold water for Los Angeles, and it did so for eight years, faithfully and without incident. A 245-foot concrete wall ("LA County Water Officials"), a 160-foot-deep reservoir, and in many ways soon-to-be explained, a shield against brewing political tensions.

U-boats arrived soon enough, and by 1942, German submarines were sinking twenty Allied ships a week. (Pool) The Navy, needing a way to drop torpedoes from planes without the impact shattering them (Davis), employed Caltech scientists to figure it out. Morris Dam, being isolated, deep, and 20 miles from Pasadena, was a convenient testing ground.

Pictured above is the dam-turned-testing-ground, with the partially-submerged target platform marking where thousands of torpedoes were fired between 1943 and 1993. A 150-foot tower on top of the dam held a slingshot that launched torpedoes 200 feet, yet only a quarter-mile north sat the real machinery: a massive ski jump launcher that could blast torpedoes into the water at 680 mph, every impact tracked by hydrophones and cameras lurking just under the surface. (Pool)

And yet again, Morris faithfully did its job: torpedo modifications developed here helped sink sixty Japanese ships at Leyte. (Pool) Not to mention, Morris Dam never stopped storing water.

St. Francis Dam started only as a testament to the ambition of mankind. Once built, it became hope manifest for quickly-growing, electrically-starved Los Angeles. When it fell, it became the second deadliest civil engineering disaster in American history.

Navy merchant, lumberjack, well-digger, gold-prospector, and, most detrimentally, engineer, William Mulholland boasted many titles, and a self-taught education. May 1926, he wrapped up construction of St. Francis Dam. Rising 205 feet above San Francisquito Canyon, forty miles north of Los Angeles, the concrete gravity dam was designed to hold 12.4 billion gallons of water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct (“St. Francis Dam Disaster”), serving both the city's hydroelectric power stations downstream, as well as its growing population (only around 10,000 at Mulholland’s time of arrival in 1877). ("Historical General Population") 

The dam was integral to the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply's expansion plans: its reservoir would regulate water flow to the hydroelectric plants, allowing the city’s booming population to spread throughout. This photograph, taken just 4 days after the disaster, captures the dam's haunting remains: only the center still standing amid the rubble-strewn canyon.

On March 12, 1928, the dam failed, heralding in catastrophe as a 140-foot wall of water roared down the canyon toward Santa Clara River Valley, killing hundreds in their sleep. Investigations later revealed that Mulholland had ignored many a warning sign: cracks, leaks, reports of unstable geology—the very reason the dam failed, as the only way for the wings to collapse before the center is for the mountainsides to give way.

This center section was aptly dubbed “the Tombstone.” As 411 corpses (Stansell) undertook the 6-hour, 70-mile journey from San Francisquito Canyon into the Pacific Ocean, the Tombstone marked not only their graves, but the end of an era of unchecked ambition in the race to electrify Los Angeles.

Works Cited:

Hanson, Victor Davis. "California's Promethean Past: How a Visionary Entrepreneur Watered and Powered Los Angeles." City Journal, Summer 2013, www.city-journal.org/article/californias-promethean-past. Accessed 17 Mar. 2026.

"Big Creek Hydroelectric Project." Southern California Edison, www.sce.com/about-sce/community/camp-edison/big-creek. Accessed 17 Mar. 2026.

"Big Creek - Early Big Creek Construction Photos." Southern California Edison Photographs and Negatives, photCL SCE 13 - vol 051, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 1912-1916. Accessed 17 Mar. 2026.

Davis, W. W. "Torpedoes: Their Use and Development During the War." Nature, vol. 158, no. 4011, 14 Sept. 1946, pp. 364-67. Accessed 17 Mar. 2026.

Pool, Bob. "Torpedo Test Site Launched New Arms Era" Los Angeles Times, 27 Mar. 2003, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-27-me-surround27-story.html. Accessed 17 Mar. 2026.

"LA County Water Officials Celebrate the 90th Anniversary of Morris Dam, Commemorate Site as National Historic Engineering Landmark." Los Angeles County, 18 Oct. 2024, www.lacounty.gov/2024/10/18/la-county-water-officials-celebrate-the-90th-anniversary-of-morris-dam-commemorate-site-as-national-historic-engineering-landmark. Accessed 17 Mar. 2026.