Damkeeper Tony Harnischfeger family cabin

This was where a humble cabin housed the man charged with inspecting the dam and reporting to the department of water and power on leaks and changes in the clarity of the water in the leaks. All dams leak is the mantra of the constructors, it is the nature of the leak the forewarns of danger. Clear water trickling from the sides are not a concern, only when it gets muddy as the source of the mud may be a canyon wall deteriorating in its support of the manmade structure.

On the last minutes of this monday night turning to Tuesday morning -- Tony, his son Coder and Leona Johnson, a young lady living with the two of them, were the first to perish in the dam failure as their small cabin was less than a half mile downstream from base of the 180 foot dam and its spillway.

That cold March evening in the San Francisquito canyon also found a few hundred residents living between the dam and the canyon mouth to Saugus, eleven twisting miles below the dam face and through the canyon to its widening mouth.

All will face a devastating torrent of water and mud and boulders along with barbed wire and fenceposts and tree limbs in the first minutes after the dam's failure. Most will perish and a few will survive in miraculous stories.

Harnischfeger and his family are most likely among the first casualties caught in the flood wave, which is about 140 feet high when it hits their cottage, approximately one-quarter mile downstream from the dam. The body of Leona Johnson would be found fully clothed and wedged between two blocks of concrete near the base of the dam. This leads to the notion she and the damkeeper might have been inspecting the dam immediately before its failure. Neither Tony Harnischfeger's body nor that of his 6-year-old son, Coder, would ever be recovered.