Flood of ’38 Forever Altered the Southland Landscape

The pummeling rains of two weeks ago made Donna Gustin Crippen feel as if she were 8 years old and it was 1938 again -- when rain fell in feet, not inches, and her neighbors were swept to their deaths.

Crippen, now curator of the El Monte Historical Museum, lives only a few miles from the El Monte parsley and celery ranch where she grew up. She remembers all too well the “Great Flood of 1938,” when unexpectedly powerful rains caused thousands of square miles of Southern California to revert to an inland sea.

“I could have paddled a rowboat out our front door,” Crippen said in a recent interview. “My father’s World War I iron helmet and uniform and our family photo collection were snatched away, just like that. Neighbors drowned, roads flooded and hundreds of dead hogs floated down the San Gabriel River.”

The flood killed more than 100 people, and left thousands homeless and scores missing. It was Southern California’s deadliest flood of the 20th century.

At the time, nobody knew that the blame for the fierce winter lay with a climate condition that would come to be called El Nino, meaning “little boy” in Spanish. It also refers to the Christ child, because South American fishermen first noticed the phenomenon around Christmas.

The relentless five-day spate of rainstorms began Feb. 27, in late winter. The deluge collapsed bridges, buckled highways, overflowed rivers and dams and sent an airliner with nine aboard slamming into a mountain.

The Los Angeles, Santa Clara, San Gabriel, Rio Hondo and Santa Ana rivers flowed out of control. San Fernando Valley ranches flooded, as did roads there and elsewhere, forcing the postponement of the Academy Awards. Almost 2 feet of rain fell in the mountains, and more than a foot fell in the flatlands.

One of the single biggest death tolls came in the Mexican American settlement of Atwood in Orange County, which was swept away by an 8-foot wall of water. Forty-three perished.

A Placentia schoolteacher named Chester Whitten had persuaded 250 people in the community to take refuge in a school, saving their lives.

Fifteen more fell to their deaths as they stood on bridges in Long Beach and Universal City, gaping at the muddy torrent below. The bridges crumbled, pitching the spectators into the raging water.

On the evening of March 1, the furious storm forced a twin-engine TWA airliner bound from San Francisco to New Mexico to divert to Los Angeles. It never arrived. Weeks of searching failed to find any trace. Not until mid-June did a Fresno fruit packer named H.O. Collier find the wreckage. Following a hunch, he spotted it on a 9,000-foot peak between Bass Lake and Yosemite National Park.

By March 2, Mt. Baldy had been drenched with 15 inches of rain in two days. Boulders as big as garages tumbled down the canyons. Nearly 400 cabins and buildings in and around San Antonio Canyon washed away.

Jean Fay, a fan dancer and singer at the Wagon Wheel Tavern, saved her guitar but lost her fans when the gambling den disappeared.

Above Altadena, the Mt. Lowe Railway, the “Railway to the Clouds,” washed out. It was never rebuilt.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz’s air squadron flew over the foothills, dropping bundles of food, water and medicine to marooned residents.

Flooding in the San Fernando Valley and Malibu stranded so many Hollywood celebrities that Oscar officials postponed the Academy Awards for a week. Gerry Baur of Ojai, daughter of director George Marshall, who was then directing the film “The Goldwyn Follies,” recounted:

“We were marooned for days after the bridge over the Malibu Creek went out and a landslide on Pacific Coast Highway prevented us from leaving our Malibu Colony beach house.”

Baur, then 17, said the “film studios sent a boat to the Malibu Pier to escort my father to Santa Monica to resume filming.” But she and her mother were left to fend for themselves.

“We had no electricity for five days and cooked our meals in the fireplace,” she said in a recent interview. “It was quite an adventure.”

In the flatlands, floodwaters rose as high as the tops of car tires, and dry streets became swift streams. A railroad trestle spanning the Los Angeles River collapsed. Actor Ralph Bellamy’s Spanish-style estate, which was across from Griffith Park, washed down the river too.

With Broadway flooded downtown, truck beds were lashed atop motorboats to carry workers. Milkmen rowed deliveries almost on time. Alligators escaped from the Lincoln Park alligator farm, swimming free in the lake and the Los Angeles River.

Small amounts of gold-bearing quartz turned up at the mouth of Santa Monica Canyon. And a Hollywood man waded shin-deep across Hollywood Boulevard and found, much to his delight, particles of gold in the cuffs of his pants.

When the scale of the disaster was apparent and Los Angeles was cut off from the world, the corrupt mayor, Frank Shaw, who within months would become the first Los Angeles mayor to be recalled, reassured the nation in an emergency radio broadcast: “The sun is shining over Southern California today and ... Los Angeles is still smiling.”

On March 3, the rains returned. In Orange County, a man named Frank Ritano or Rintano -- news stories of the time spelled it both ways -- piled his wife and three children into their car to flee their Santa Ana riverbank home near Placentia. An avalanche of water carrying an entire house crossed the highway in front of Ritano’s car, which slammed into the floating structure. The family was thrown into the water.

Ritano gripped his two youngest children but had to watch as his wife and 12-year-old son were swept away. As he waded to safety, a heavy plank struck him, knocking his tiny daughter from his arms.

As he struggled to his feet, more debris pulled him underwater and wrenched his son from his grasp. Ritano spent the next day trudging from funeral home to funeral home, looking for their bodies.

It’s unclear if he found them, but the bodies of his wife and elder son were recovered.

The devastation continued into the night. In Los Angeles, hundreds of homes were washed away, and more than 1,500 were rendered uninhabitable. About 3,700 displaced residents were sheltered for a time by relief agencies. Several schools were closed for days. Many bodies washed out to sea, never to be recovered or even counted among the dead. With so many jobless men living under bridges and in canyons, an accurate toll wasn’t possible.

As bad as the disaster was, radio reporters made it worse by reporting catastrophes that never occurred. One reported that Calabasas had been wiped off the map. Another shrieked that an auto tunnel in Newhall had collapsed.

The intense storm forever altered Southern California’s relationship with the elements and the landscape.

The devastation led to massive flood-control efforts, including a network of dams and canals, as well as concrete straitjackets for most Southland rivers.