It was nearly midnight on Dec. 31, 1933, and 11-year-old Charles Bausback Jr. and his parents were gathered in the small dining area of their Evelyn Street home in Montrose, working on a jigsaw puzzle as they awaited a soggy new year.
Outside, rain had been falling almost nonstop, dropping some 14 inches in two days on the small communities of the Crescenta Valley, tucked below the formidable peaks and steep canyons of the San Gabriel Mountains.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, January 28, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 35 words Type of Material: Correction
Montrose flood: The Sunday "L.A. Then and Now" column in the California section about the 1934 Montrose flood misspelled the names of two victims as Ethel and Homer Rigley. They were Ethel and Homer Higley.
A fresh cloudburst assaulted the valley just after midnight. The house started shaking violently, Bausback, now 86, recalled.
"We got panicky," he said.
High above their home, in a wide swath of mountains laid bare by wildfires only weeks earlier, a series of check dams, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps to slow runoff, filled and weakened. In Pickens Canyon and other area canyons, the saturated ground started moving; the small dams gave way to mighty flows of boulders, mud, water and fallen trees.
Reaching at least 20 feet in height, the Pickens Canyon flow picked up speed and fury, engulfing much of Montrose. Survivors told tales of a deafening roar, trembling buildings and giant boulders skimming across the mud like beach balls.
The Montrose flood, as the calamity soon came to be called, took at least 45 lives, destroyed about 100 homes and turned the little community into a mud-filled, barren landscape, said local historian Art Cobery, who has become an expert on the catastrophe and its aftermath.
Some of the scores of photographs kept by the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley show half-buried cars, houses and businesses sitting askew in the mess and a 70-ton boulder sitting in the middle of Foothill Boulevard. Debris had crashed through the back of the American Legion Hall early on New Year's Day, sweeping to their deaths 12 of the people who had taken refuge inside.
"It was a mini Katrina that swept this valley," Cobery said, "and it just traumatized people."
Woody Guthrie wrote a song about the disaster. Rumors abounded that many others -- homeless people supposedly living in the mountains -- had perished, but those reports were not substantiated, Cobery said. Some town residents thought to have died later turned up safe, staying with relatives or friends
The Montrose flood eventually prompted the building of an elaborate system of giant debris-trapping catch basins and other flood-control projects that have significantly reduced the odds of another such tragedy, Cobery said.
