Don't give the whole book away, Chris!

Here's one from tonight. Not exactly Mulholland Dr., but I was standing on the overpass for Mulholland Hwy./Valley Circle.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1204694017.jpg

Evening shot in Carls Jr
 

Thanks Dave, but there's a lot more so not to worry. We just wanted to give a few samples of racers ideas to enliven the thread.
Here's a shot of the Valley from the racecourse on Mulholland.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1204696333.jpg

Chris, did you escape the itching from the last Mulholland canyon dive? I did. I'm ready to go again. I'd be happy to bing my metal detector along...

One more time.
 

I escaped poisoning last time, thank goodness. I hope that everyone that joined us last time is Oak free as well. Recent rains has brought the groves of poison oak back in full force. It is becoming more dangerous to bust thru the thick brush below Mulholland now.

So cover yourself up because the last time we went I saw a complete car upside-down in a ravine lower down. It had huge drum brakes and looked like a 1937 Chrysler Club Coupe. I used to have one of those cars so I am familiar with its look. The car looked complete and fairly undamaged. It's location is marked on my map that I posted earlier.

From the Barbara Fine overlook, you can clearly see with binoculars another complete car hidden inside of some trees. It looks like a big sedan or panel truck from the early 1940's. Running boards and a large front grill are visible.

See if anyone else wants to join us for a hike in the next week. It was fun with a bunch of us crawling the steep sides of the cliff over the racecourse.

Another relic that is part of the hiking trail closer to Iredale/ Brookdale area.


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1205041475.jpg

Slight rust on 911
 

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1205076005.jpg

Jeff is so good at fixing rust that he found this site showing cars that need a little attention like this beautiful 911.

http://www.supercarforums.co.uk/chatforum/viewtopic.php?t=30&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start= 0

A little bondo, primer, and paint, and you'll have a 10 point car in about 2 weeks. But we might need Kevin's and Dave's help to get it done in time. (I'm just joking guys, it will probably take at least 3 weeks).

Your humor-casm has not gone unnoticed Chris. I promise to never miss a breakfast invite ever again.

The "two weeks" quote was coined by Dean Moon. It became a joke with the custom cars guys because their work is usually forever in process (exempli gratia: the Rat Rod crowd)

Car people have a sense of humor that we have to appreciate. For example Chris has taken the "two weeks" and extended it to "three weeks" obviously poking fun in reference to rusty Porsches.

The "two week" joke has perpetuated itself over the years as a deflective canned response. When will it be ready? "Two weeks"! How long to get the parts? "Two weeks"! How long to sort the car? "Two weeks"!This is not to say everyone use's the quote or imply anything. It just adds to the humor versus answering "sometime in the near future".

This is the same kind of humor Dan McLaughlin used with "unobtanium".
Whats it made of ? "Unobtanium"! To this day Tony Davis gets a sideways funny look on his face when he hears "unobtainium".

One person who took the "two week" joke to an entire new level was Paul Mason. His version was " we will sell no wine before it's time" indicating again sometime in the near future otherwise you will be drinking grape juice.

Even Doctors and Dentists resort to their version of "two weeks". How long will it last? "Give it a couple of weeks"!

The list goes on.................



In the spirit of automobile project humor Chris I am revising my eta to "three weeks" due to delays with outsourcing. ;)

The picture Jeff posted, was taken by another Pelican...

Cars should not be abandoned. If you have a passion for them great. If life circumstances dictate they need to go sell them to someone who will appreciate them for what they are. If they need work fix them or pass them on to someone who will.

To imagine any of these below were abandoned or forgotten is blasphemy!!!!!

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1205093086.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1205093146.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1205093216.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1205093318.gif

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1205093344.jpg

blasphemy maby. but those cars wernt nearly as valuable back when they were abandoned. i look at those cars as an opportunity. It would be blasphemy if they were crushed!

Hey Jeff,

If you are going to post a picture of this one, at least tell the story ;)
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1205093086.jpg

Here's the article on it from Car & Driver in 2001.
That murderous slime bucket Phil Spector is just one of the nut-jobs that owned it.

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/all/2001/death_deception_and_the_4_million_cobra_feature/(page)/1

I really didn't want to bring it up. The car's story goes along with this
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1205118335.jpg
and Derek could not have described it better

Dave,
Look at it from this point of view. It is just wrong....really wrong

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1205119022.jpg

It may be wrong, but ya made me laugh!

Couple of you keyboard jockeys were missed this morning in the canyons off Mul. Perhaps you need to post less, drive more..... [ducking for cover]

I'm waiting for 91 to go over $4.00 a gallon. I wanna feel like a high roller!

Mulholland's 2nd Dam
 

The anniversary of the St. Francis Dam failure is tomorrow.

Here is a recent article about the infamous disaster by Carol Bidwell.

Interestingly, the first place you are taken to in the field while working on a Geology degree is the St. Francis Dam site.

One side of the canyon at the dam site has an earthquake fault, the other side of the canyon is made of rock (Pelona Schist) that falls apart in water.

The first dam that Mulholland created was for the Hollywood resevoir. The very first road called Mulholland Drive was the drive around that resevoir.



The Day the St. Francis Dam broke
By Carol Bidwell Staff Writer
Article Launched: 03/05/2008 11:25:18 AM PST


It was 11:57 p.m. March 12, 1928, when the rumbling started.

The St. Francis Dam in San Francisquito Canyon, about 10 miles east of present-day Interstate 5 near Saugus, had given way, unleashing a 185-foot-high wall of water down the Santa Clara River and 54 miles to the sea.

"I looked out the window upstairs and there was that water coming in great white waves," Nazarene Eva Donlon, the daughter of an El Rio rancher, recalled years after the flood. "You could smell that water."

The Donlon family was able to make it to higher ground. Others weren't as fortunate.

Officials at the time estimated that the flood killed 450 people - including 20 entire families - although the death toll eventually topped 600 as more bodies were unearthed over the years.

The flood also washed away 1,240 homes and other buildings, inundated 23,500 acres of farmland and washed out four railroad bridges, eight miles of railroad track and untold miles of roads and highways, according to a committee set up immediately afterward to assess the damage.

Among the first to die were workers at two power-generating stations and Edison Co. employees and their families who lived in homes just below the dam.

By 12:40 a.m., the water reached Saugus, where homes full of sleeping people were washed away.

Still, there was no official warning that the dam had burst. Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies, monitoring Edison radios, heard word of the disaster and passed it on.

"The St. Francis Dam is out! We've got a helluva flood coming!" was the frantic message shouted over and over by a few Ventura County sheriff's deputies who raced to warn towns and ranches along the Santa Clara River downstream.
"We jumped in our cars and took off," said Bismark M. Basolo Sr., a Fillmore farmer. "We could see the water coming up the highway ... It highway. ... It just missed us by about 10 feet. We was lucky to get out with our son and ourselves."

His brother, who was a little slower, was overtaken by the flood.

Warning signs

Landslides had been reported around the dam for several days. But William Mulholland, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and other officials had inspected the dam 12 hours before the collapse and pronounced it sound.

Many downstream residents never knew of the existence of the dam, built quietly in the mountains to store water brought from the Owens Valley for use by Los Angeles residents. But others had visited the dam out of curiosity, and some of them were worried.

E. Domingo Hardison, a Fillmore citrus rancher, said his father had checked out the dam a few days earlier.

"When he came back, he said, 'That dam is going out!' There certainly was trouble there."

The dam was leaking and the water was muddy, Hardison said. To the farmers, that was a sign that the dirt underneath was shifting dangerously. That night, the dam crumbled on both its east and west flanks, unleashing 12.5 billion gallons of water.

Deadly aftermath

As the sun rose, the business of cleaning up, finding and burying the dead, and feeding and clothing the survivors began. Merchants emptied their stores of shoes and clothing, the Red Cross began a nationwide drive to feed and house the survivors, and those untouched by the flood pitched in to help their less fortunate neighbors.

Somis ranch manager William F. Miller said all the community's tractors were mobilized to move dirt and sand - and dig for bodies. Classes at local high schools were abandoned and students and Boy Scouts helped search for flood victims, who were laid out and hosed off with garden hoses so their identity could be established.

In some areas, the bodies of men, women and children "were hanging in trees," recalled Harold Bookman of Bardsdale, south of Fillmore. "They made every place a morgue, including the school," said Nazarene Donlon, who recalls seeing rows of bodies covered by sheets and blankets - and grieving family members searching for lost loved ones among the dead. Mass burials were conducted in every riverside community.

Taking responsibility

As the cleanup and mourning went on, the clamor to know who was responsible for the tragedy began. Mulholland, who'd picked the site for the dam, designed it and vouched for its soundness, was the most likely target. One Santa Paula woman finally gave up shoveling mud out of her home and painted a sign - "Kill Mulholland" - which she planted in what remained of her front yard.

Los Angeles city officials were quick to accept responsibility for the disaster and to promise to repay its victims - a total of about $5.5 million, according to claims records.

At first, there was talk that Owens Valley farmers, enraged at water they regarded as theirs being diverted for use by Los Angeles residents, had dynamited the dam. Mulholland himself hinted that sabotage was the cause.

But geologists and engineers have generally agreed that the collapse was triggered by the instability of the underlying soil and cracks caused by an earthquake fault running underneath the dam.

Both sides of the structure failed, leaving only a center section standing. That was later dynamited to remove any danger to inquisitive hikers and, some said, to remove the last traces of what was a vast embarrassment to the city of Los Angeles and its officials.

The dam, said a report to the governor, had been doomed to fail.

"Don't blame anybody else; you just fasten it on me," an anguished Mulholland said at a coroner's inquest into the flood deaths. "If there was an error of human judgment, I was that human."

A coroner's jury had the final word: Los Angeles had grown too big, too fast and, in its frenzy to supply both water and power for its burgeoning population, it had blundered.

Construction and operation of so great a dam with so great a destructive force, the jury concluded, "should never be left to the sole judgment of one man, no matter how eminent, without checking by independent expert authorities, for no one is free from error."

Laugh? Geeesh, that pic almost made me incontinent. Waay too damned funny. You guys slay me. Which was a nice mood swing after the sadness of seeing that dead Miura ... the horrah, the horrah.

[QUOTE=Banning;3822067]The anniversary of the St. Francis Dam failure is tomorrow.


Many of us here on thread have a thing for history. I do and I know Chris does.
Throw in some geography and geology for good measure. Like learning how things came to be and what makes them tick. Put it all together and you have the dynamics of three things- time, location and substance.

Those three things all went bad when the St. Francis Dam failed. Designed by a man, built by men and machines with the best intentions.

I live in Santa Clarita. I have driven up and down San Francisquito Canyon many times. I have been to the former dam site and Chris has frequented the site when taking geology classes at CSUN. You have to be there to even remotely grasp how large this reservoir was.

Dams scare the hell out of me. They just do when you realize the mechanics of what is holding back billions of gallons of water. It isn't the structure that unnerves me it is what they are anchored to that does and that is rock and dirt. Anyone who has lived in Los Angeles for the past 40 years may relate to this. 1971 and 1994 the earth moved big time. I live exactly 31 feet above the top of Castaic Dam for that reason. Castaic is an earthen dam and that unnerves me just that much more. Gravity and 31 feet puts me at ease.

Some of us have had an interest in William Mulholland. Not just the road that is named after him but the man and his achievements. My travels in California have brought me to the Owens Valley, Mono Lake, the Aqua duct system, Los Angeles Terminus (Balboa and San Fernando waterslide off the 5 Fwy), Pyramid Lake visitors center which has a great history area of the water system and Mulholland the man.

William Mulholland came to this country as an immigrant with nothing. He worked in the streets and eventually came west to California. He worked his way up from from just a peon to apprentice, journeyman and ultimately superintendent of the water system. Mulholland had ambition to make a better world for Southern California. He achieved that and more but one bad day ruined everything for Bill.

Every time you turn on a faucet in Southern California that doesn’t come from a well and water comes out William Mulholland made that happen. The California Aqua duct system is taken for granted. It was never designed to handle what it does today but it does even know it is overtaxed. It still supplies enough water to our desert making it an oasis of green and manicured lawns. By today’s standard Mulholland’s water system eclipses what the Romans had constructed for their water supply. Pretty damn big achievement for a guy with almost no formal education.

In my travels and information learned among the way about William Mulholland I realized he was just a man. He was talented, respected but still a man no different than you or I. He was human and mistakes happen. I personally do not think direct blame should have ever been placed on Mulholland because geology and fault data in the 1920’s is not what it is now. He had the best intentions based on the knowledge of the time and still a failure occurred.

I commend any man who takes ownership for a disaster such as the St. Francis Dam collapse. William Mulholland knew this would end his career and reputation. A tremendous burden to bear and he took it all on himself. It ultimately crushed him and the burden was too great to endure. I do not think I could live with the specter of hundreds of lives lost if something in my charge went horribly south such as this.

Most important it reminds we are just human’s on a little planet in a big galaxy in an even larger universe. We are not perfect and do make mistakes. It is human to err –
Forgive! God does.