The concrete of the aquaduct will last as long as the pyramids of Egypt or the Parthenon of Athens... Long after Joe Harriman is elected mayor of Los Angeles.
Olé olé olé for Mulholland ... See the water fall.
Frank Black, Ole Mulholland
I knew the name Mulholland from this song by Frank Black, from the painting by David Hockney and the movie by David Lynch. I looked him up after hearing that today was the aniversary of the St. Francis Dam disaster.
William Mulholland built the San Francisquito Dam as part of his plan to funnel water into the growing city of Los Angeles. Mulholland had built many water projects and had a proven track record. By the time he built the fated dam north east of LA, he was a powerful man.
Midnight exactly seventy five years ago must have been horrendous - a thirty foot high wave, poured toward the sea and ripped it's way through the agricultural towns along the way. Hundreds of people, mostly farm workers were killed. Mulholland, who had made LA possible by delivering water through his Owens Valley aquaduct, was disgraced.
Mulholland has since regained the adoration of Los Angeleans. Findings in the last decade have suggested the dam was doomed by the geology of the ground it was built upon and the technology of the twenties could not have detected the problem. But threats by political enemies of Mulholland were recieved before collapse were never explained either.
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| The Mulholland dam, shown here in a 1926 real estate picture, still supplies water to millions of people and industries in Los Angeles.
There it is. Take it! - William Mulholland |
The referrers to this site represent the address of the last page visited before getting here to 101-365. Sixty percent of my referrers come from Google, Yahoo or some other search engine. They usually go to story pages or to the front page. Story destinations are fine, the get the information they are looking for, but landing on the front page is a problem.
Well, not for me, cause they get to read about AFM probes, Raisinette™ or see a picture or two. But they are looking for something else, something I may have written weeks ago, that has now scrolled off the page. My index was created to help them out. You can go to the index and find the topic of interest, and visit those pages. But ...
The index may be two weeks out of date - it's labor intensive to update, and only one percent of all visitors go to the index. So even though I like the index - it's book like - it's not the best solution for lost searchers. The individual titles of story pages make them better targets for searching, probably because they increase the ranking of the pages above generically named archived daily entries. (Click the ball at the end of this post to see what I'm talking about.)
Radio has an option to add titles to archives, but the title is only internal to the content, it doesn't appear in the title bar of the page, nor in the name of the page's file, and those qualities increase rank. I do not have a solution to making archived content accessible to searchers other than to put stuff in a story, but that is lots more work than posting to the blog.
