Southern California Edison's Saugus Substation

As we near the intersection of the 126 and 5 freeways, if you look to the east/southeast, you might be able to make out the existing SCE substation. Its location has not changed since the night the flood came through.

It was 12:40 in the morning and the graveyard shift at the station. What began as a 150 foot wall of water 10 miles upstream at the dam face had spread and subsided to 55 feet of mud, boulders and debris when the flood roared out of San Francisquito canyon toward a sleepy Saugus, then a small town of perhaps a couple hundred souls.

Several small buildings at the Edison substation were destroyed, among them some of the workers' cottages, as "a thick layer of sand, gravel and debris ... pushed south over the Santa Clara River channel". The substation was inundated and the transformer yard was littered with debris.

The substation was built between August 1923 and August 1924 on the south/west side of today's Magic Mountain Parkway in what is now Valencia. It replaced the smaller 1899 Castaic Substation. 

The night crew at the Substation "didn't need a wake-up call," historian John Wilkman writes, when the St. Francis Dam failed just before midnight on March 12. "They were startled into action when an oil switch exploded, setting off a fire. ... Something had gone terribly wrong and no one was sure what caused it"

"Less than forty minutes after the collapse," Wilkman writes, "the leading edge of the flood emerged from the confines of San Francisquito Canyon and widened. ... By now, the oil switch fire was under control. Frank Thees was standing outside with other employees:

"We heard a roaring noise which at first we thought was a train on the tracks near the highway. We soon realized ... that a large volume of water was running down the Santa Clara River. ... One of the Big Creek lines flashed over and lit up the entire country, showing us that water was already across the highway".

Wesley Griswold of Popular Science described it some years later:

"The plunging waters from the breached dam, still 50 feet deep, in half an hour scoured out the contents of the canyon, drowned the substation, and lurched into a huge, devastating right curve as they found the bed of the river. At about this time, a six-man crew of Edison workers — responding to an emergency alarm from Saugus that they thought involved a fire — raced into the head of the flood in their wire-enclosed Dodge truck and were rolled over and over. Miraculously, they were flung back out of the water and escaped serious injury."

In the aftermath and ensuing inquest and findings, the power station being knocked offline left an important "time stamp" and helped in determining the overall timeline of events along the disaster path.