Waves of time

Ellen McCarty

By 1931, more than 2,000 U.S. banks had closed. Across the nation tax

delinquencies and property foreclosures increased dramatically.

As unemployment skyrocketed, local and federal agencies were overwhelmed

by thousands of relief applications.

Despite the oil industry’s soaring wealth in Huntington Beach, the city

was not spared the dire impacts of the Great Depression.

The Huntington Beach News reported that as the oil industry slowed, more

men were out of work and burglaries throughout the city were on the rise.

To shake things up even more, Orange County suffered an earthquake in

1933 and a flood in 1938.

At 5:54 p.m. on March 10, 1933, an earthquake struck Long Beach.

Huntington Beach suffered some of the worst damage in Orange County.

The front walls of several brick buildings collapsed, as did many wooden

oil derricks. The fire station was rendered useless and men had to sleep

outside in tents for a month while the building was repaired.

In February 1938, torrents of water rushed from Santa Ana Canyon and

quickly covered 290,000 acres of land in several counties. It was the

area’s worst flood in 70 years. The United States Army Corps of Engineers

reported that 87 lives were lost and $78.6 million in damage was caused

by the six-day flood.

Houses, highways, bridges and citrus groves were destroyed. In Huntington

Beach, the flood not only devastated farmers’ crops, but left miles of

land covered with a sticky coating of clay-like mud.

The following May, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved funds to

develop a flood control plan for Orange County.

Water, and not just flood water, was one of the most important issues of

the 1930s.

The battle over oil in the tidelands grew fierce when geologists

estimated there were 7 million barrels of black gold under the beach and

ocean. This was obvious during stormy days when clumps of asphalt and

oil washed ashore, creating an unsightly mess for fishermen and swimmers.

The Standard Oil Co. had acquired land along the beach and set up

operations for straight-down drilling, but another group, McVicar,

McCallen and Rood, invented a removable whipstock drill that enabled the

company to slant-drill under the Standard Oil wells and out into the

ocean.

When Standard Oil challenged McVicar over the right to drill, the

Huntington Beach News supported the independent operators and held that

oil was a “migratory mineral which, in the case of the billion-dollar oil

pool, had been placed there not by Standard Oil, but by God.”

Fountain Valley resident Tom Talbert deserves credit for the compromise

that settled the tideland problem.

In 1935, he devised a plan that would grant oil percentages to the

Huntington Beach Co., Pacific Electric Co., the city of Huntington Beach,

the state and the oil companies.

Mother Nature raged again in September 1939, when a violent rainstorm,

accompanied by strong winds, tore a 300-foot section from the Huntington

Beach Pier and demolished several homes in Sunset Beach.

That same month, Germany invaded Poland, and with the arrival of the

1940s, many Huntington Beach residents found themselves navigating

foreign waters or defending their own shore.