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HOW TO GET INVOLVED WITH YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL
If you are interested in performing public service by serving on your Neighborhood Council, you will be welcome.
Members of the Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council are seated in three ways:
The Boards of Residential Stakeholder Groups (homeowners and resident associations) in our area appoint their representative on the Council according to their own appointment or election process. These representatives are responsible for the interests of their constituents and report to the Board that elected them.
There are also Neighborhood Council Board seats “at large” to represent stakeholders who are not represented by Residential Stakeholder Groups.
A third group of representatives are selected by the Board to represent Non-residential Groups.
All Neighborhood Council meetings are open to the public. Meetings are currently held by Zoom so you can attend meetings from your home. To get started, you should attend the meetings and acquaint yourself with the Council.
Here is information produced by the Los Angeles Department of Neighborhood Empowerment which will provide more information.
https://clerk.lacity.org/clerk-services/elections/nc-elections.
Application period opens November 26 and closes January 10, 2023 |
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SCRAPBOOK: The history of our Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood
Council Communities and those communities around us
THE RISE AND FALL OF WILLIAM MULHOLLAND
The Northern border of the Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council is Mulholland Drive, the famous mountain street with incredible views. It is named for William Mulholland – a man whose inventiveness and leadership gave Los Angeles a generous supply of water. He also made decisions that created one of the world’s worst disasters that ruined his career and life.
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William Mulholland
Mulholland was an Irish immigrant who had lived a rough life (his father beat him) and was eventually hired as a ditch digger laborer for the City of Los Angeles Water Company. He became interested in water engineering, read textbooks and studied hydrology, slowly rising through the ranks where his opinions became respected and sought out.
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Fred Eaton, former Mayor of Los Angeles
After 1900, through a former Los Angele mayor, Fred Eaton, Los Angelinos became concerned with the possibility of drought and lack of water for future growth. This resulted in the controversial acquisition of land in the Owens Valley, where snowfall runoff from the High Sierra Mountains filled the Owens River with water each year.
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An aqueduct from Owens valley reaching 233 miles into Los Angeles was proposed. It was designed by Mulholland to move water by gravity flow, without electric pumps and in fact produced electricity for the city of Los Angeles. The project was completed on time and on budget in 1913. The lake in our Franklin Canyon Park was one of the first reservoirs, part of the original system.
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Sticks of dynamite to blowup the acquaduct
After the aqueduct was built, angry farmers and ranchers from Owens valley who believed they were not fairly compensated for the land and whose farming future was ended by draining the water out of their area to provide water for Los Angeles, dynamited the aqueduct. Even more violence was threatened.
Mulholland had constructed a series of reservoirs to store the water and believed a new dam, near the path of the aqueduct but far enough from the Owens Valley would insure a consistent water supply should other acts of violence impede the flow of water to Los Angeles.
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St. Francis Dam just after it was filled
The site he chose was in San Francisquito Canyon near Santa Clarita. Between 1924 and 1926 a new dam was constructed named the St. Francis Dam. The first phase involved digging exploratory tunnels and shafts to determine the characteristics of the earth and to estimate the effect water would have.
Years earlier, in 1911, Mulholland had noted the unstable earth on the East side of the Canyon but Stanley Durham, the construction supervisor felt the tests he ordered showed the rock to be hard and more than suitable for the construction of the dam.
Later analysis determined the area to be of “Heavy Ground” - earth that is weak and is high geostress ground that causes repeated failures. No one knew of this when the dam was being built.
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The St. Francis Dam was built as a gravity dam, made of concrete. In this type of dam, the huge weight of the water it was holding back is matched by the weight of the material used in the dam. The resistance by the foundation opposes the horizontal pressure of the water pushing against it. Part of the foundation is the integrity of the rock and earth against which the dam is constructed
The St. Francis dam was completed and filled with water from the aqueduct. It was huge, rising 207 feet above its foundation. It stretched back 3 miles with 182 feet depth of water. The dam held back approximately 12.5 billion gallons of water.
Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, there was a sudden roaring sound in the night from the dam. A woman living in employee housing asked her husband if it was the wind. According to the book “Heavy Ground” another woman looked out her window at the dam and saw a mist rising into the air.
In the next moment the great 207 foot tall dam fell apart and 12.5 billion gallons of water spilled down San Francisquito Canyon. It was a wall of water 180 feet high, racing down the Santa Clara River, below the dam, toward the towns of Santa Paula, Fillmore, Piru, Castaic Junction, Bardsdale, orange groves and people asleep in the night. It destroyed everything in its path, washing across Highway 1 and spilling into the Pacific Ocean, 54 miles from the reservoir.
Approximately 411 people were killed. Bodies washed to sea were recovered from as far south as the Mexican border.
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Section of St. Francis Dam carried by the force of water a quarter mile away.
It is still there.
The St. Francis Dam catastrophe is considered to be one of the worst American civil engineering disasters of the 20th Century and the second greatest loss of life in California history after the San Francisco earthquake and fire.
Mulholland, shocked and sickened, took full responsibility for the disaster, “don't blame anyone else, you just fasten it on me. If there was an error in human judgment, I was the human, I won't try to fasten it on anyone else.”
The coroner’s jury found no evidence of criminal act on the part of Mulholland, the Board of Water Works or any employee or engineer but the legal liability of the City of Los Angeles was huge. Mullholland’s daughter wrote in her biography of her father that the St Francis dam disaster was caused by soil concepts that were not known in her father’s day.
Crushed and now very much abandoned, Mulholland resigned and retired into relative obscurity. His future was over. He died 7 years later of a stroke. – a sad ending for a man who more than any other person brought life giving water to the Los Angeles desert that allowed Los Angeles to grow. It was a true tragedy, for the hundreds of people who lost their lives and their families that were shattered and for an incredible man who unknowingly caused the catastrophe and bore the weight of responsibility
Andre Stojka
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THE LOS ANGELES NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL SYSTEM
Because of the size of Los Angeles, each Los Angeles City Council member represents around 250,000 people. To keep City officials in closer touch with the neighborhoods of the City, in 1999 Los Angeles adopted a Neighborhood Council system to advise the City Council members of local issues.
There are 99 separate Neighborhood Councils in the City of Los Angeles. Members of the Neighborhood Council are considered City employees without compensation of any kind. They are formally elected by the public or communities and must live, work or own property in the area they represent.
The Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council represents approximately 28,000 people in a beautiful mountain and canyon area of the City of Los Angeles bounded on the West by Sepulveda Boulevard, on the North, Mulholland Drive, on the South by Sunset Boulevard and the East by Laurel Canyon.
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Santa Monica Mountains
home to our Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council communities
The Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council Community News is published by the Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council Outreach Committee:
Robin Greenberg, Mindy Mann, Nickie Miner,
Robert Schlesinger, Maureen Smith, Patricia Templeton
Andre Stojka, Outreach Chairperson and Newsletter Editor
BABCNC President: Travis Longcore
Newsletter (c) 2022 Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council
Scrapbook (c) 2022 Andre Stojka
Photo Credits: Shutterstock, MRSC, LA Metro, Wickapedia, Calaware.org, Wikidata, Water and Power Associates, Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy
Your comments are solicited and appreciated.
Please contact us at: outreach@babcnc.org
Please forward this newsletter to neighbors who you feel will be interested. To subscribe to this free newsletter click here.
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