San Diego History · Otay Valley
San Diego hired a man to make rain, and then refused to pay him.
Charles Hatfield, the 1916 flood, the failure of Lower Otay Dam and the deal he would not sign. All records sourced and cited.
Charles Hatfield, the 1916 flood, the failure of Lower Otay Dam and the deal he would not sign. All records sourced and cited.
In December of 1915 the San Diego city council voted four to one to hire a man to make it rain. Seven weeks later a dam had broken, at least twenty two people were dead, and the city was refusing to pay him.
It refused for a reason that is still the most interesting thing about the story. Paying Charles Hatfield would have been close to admitting he caused the flood. The city attorney worked that out fast, and he had one more move after that.
Two other things worth knowing first. The contract was never put in writing, and the city's own attorney was instructed to write it. And the lawsuit Hatfield filed sat on a court calendar almost twenty two years without being heard.
Hatfield was a part time sewing machine salesman, born in Kansas in 1876, who left school after the ninth grade and read his way into meteorology at the public library. He worked it out in the kitchen at his family's ranch in Gopher Canyon, between Bonsall and Vista. When he released a particular mix of chemicals into the air, steam off a teakettle bent sideways toward it. If steam, he reasoned, why not clouds.
He was careful about the claim. "I do not make rain," he wrote. "I merely attract the clouds and they do the rest. The conditions that produce rain are drawn by my system as a magnet draws steel." Twenty three chemicals and electricity, he said, never explosives. One critic said the gasses smelled so bad it rained in self defense.
The city had reason to listen. By 1905 Glendale was begging him not to invoke moisture on the Rose Parade. In 1907 he promised Hemet four inches and produced seven.
He submitted three alternatives to the council on December 9, all totaling ten thousand dollars. The council took the simplest: fill Morena Reservoir by December 20 of the following year, ten thousand dollars, no rain no pay. The vote on December 13 was four to one, and the council instructed the city attorney to prepare a written contract.
Asked whether such a contract would even be legal, City Attorney Terence Cosgrove grinned and said that if Hatfield filled Morena, he guessed there would be no doubt about the legality.
Hatfield started work on January 1 without waiting for the paperwork. His apparatus was a wooden tower about twenty feet high with shallow pans on a platform at the top, from which he said he evaporated a secret fluid.
The rain began in the second week of January and did not stop. By the eighteenth the San Diego River was over its banks across Mission Valley, the Little Landers colony in the Tijuana River valley was destroyed with two women drowned, and more than two hundred bridges had washed out. Morena took twenty eight inches that month.
Mid storm Hatfield phoned the water superintendent, Herbert Fay. Seventeen inches up there already, he said, looked like the city would have to pay him. Fay told him he was not getting any, there were only thirteen, they had measured it. Hatfield said if that was the attitude, he would put double strength into the elements.
Then he told anyone who asked that the twenty seventh was the day. On the twenty sixth the Union ran a front page cartoon of a rancher chasing him into San Diego Bay. A second Pacific storm, tracked from Hawaii on the eighteenth, came ashore on the twenty seventh.
Lower Otay Dam was a rock fill structure with a steel plate core wall. At about a quarter to five that afternoon the water reached the top. At five past five the steel diaphragm tore away at the center and, in the words of the engineer who watched it, the dam opened outward like a pair of gates.
Roughly thirteen billion gallons went down the valley. Engineers who surveyed it put the wave at six to twenty feet high. It covered the ten miles to Palm City in forty eight minutes.
The wave also took a barn in the Otay Valley where John J. Montgomery's family had kept his early gliders for more than thirty years, the ones from the hill on Otay Mesa that might have settled when he first flew (the glider story).
Sweetwater Dam was overtopped and badly damaged but held. Morena held only because the dam keeper opened the outlet valves before midnight against his instructions, and the city engineer walked nine miles to Campo for dynamite to break a debris jam at the spillway.
The federal count of the dead, collected from the San Diego County coroner and published by the United States Geological Survey, is twenty two drowned in the county, most of them in Otay Valley below the dam. The historical marker says fifteen. The Union reported at least seventeen. Contemporary newspaper figures ran as high as sixty five.
None of those counts is complete and everyone involved knew it. An isolated Japanese farming colony in Otay Valley lost its truck farms outright, and for days afterward Japanese fishing boats worked the upper end of the bay looking for bodies. Don M. Stewart, who ran a rescue team on the river that week, wrote that he did not believe those dead were ever counted, and that a realistic figure is closer to fifty.
At the height of it somebody said out loud that the city should pay Hatfield a hundred thousand dollars to quit.
Hatfield and his brother walked the sixty miles in from Morena and held a press conference on February 4. Asked whether he would accept liability if he took credit for the rain, he said the benefits outweighed the damages. Asked about the dead, he said it was deplorable and that he did not feel responsible.
On February 17 he told the council that the essence of his contract was to fill Morena, that it had been done, and that he wanted his ten thousand dollars.
Cosgrove asked him how much water he claimed to have put in.
Four billion gallons, Hatfield said, if not more.
But you agreed to put in ten billion, Cosgrove said.
That was the whole case. Cosgrove ruled that by Hatfield's own statement he had not fulfilled the contract and the city had no liability. He had a second argument in reserve: the council resolution had accepted "Hatfield's offer" without specifying which of the three, making the claim unenforceable either way.
Two councilmen objected on the record. Benbough said four of them had voted to accept the man's proposition and told him to go ahead, and that he ought to be paid.
Almost certainly not, and the reason is better than the question. Before taking a job, Hatfield and his brothers studied the climate records of wherever they were going. San Diego County had produced a major flood roughly every eleven years and the last was in 1905. He took the contract in December 1915. The next one after 1916 arrived in 1927.
The rain came from Pacific storms the Weather Bureau tracked across the whole region, soaking Riverside, San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Ventura as thoroughly as San Diego, and the heaviest single day anywhere fell a hundred miles from Hatfield's tower. Deliberate weather modification did not begin until 1946, and even now it needs a storm that already exists.
The Weather Bureau's San Diego forecaster considered Hatfield a mountebank and said so before the flood, not after.
He left San Diego in protest and, by his own account, to stay alive, since there were rumors of vigilantes looking for him in the back country. He went back to selling sewing machines, claimed he and his brothers had milked the sky five hundred and three times without a failure, and died in Glendale in 1958. Thirty years on he told a reporter he had never felt right about that San Diego city council.
The reservoirs Hatfield was hired to fill are still part of the city's water system, and the valley the wave came down is the eastern edge of Chula Vista.
See the current numbers on the Chula Vista market report, updated monthly from closed MLS sales.
The council vote, the contract terms and the city attorney's offer come from Thomas W. Patterson's account in the Journal of San Diego History (1970) and the City of San Diego Digital Archives. The flood, the dam and the death count come from the United States Geological Survey, Water Supply Paper 426 (1918), and from Engineering News and Engineering Record in February 1916. Hatfield's background, the Fay call and Don M. Stewart's account come from Jeff Smith in the San Diego Reader (2003). Where the death counts disagree, we have printed all of them.
Cosgrove and his assistant offered Hatfield the full ten thousand dollars, on the condition that he sign a statement accepting responsibility for the flood and absolving the city.
Hatfield refused to sign it.
He had already offered to settle for four thousand. He never took the deal that required him to own the deaths, and was never paid anything. His suit sat on the calendar for nearly twenty two years and was dismissed in 1938 for lack of prosecution. Separate suits by flood victims went to trial in Orange and San Bernardino counties, where the courts ruled the rain an act of God rather than an act of Hatfield.
More San Diego history: every story, oldest history first.