Los Gatos Weekly-Times file photograph
Los Gatos hills, like those shown above, drank in water from the Killer Storm of 1982.
The great fire of 1901 destroyed most of downtown Los Gatos and perimeter homes to boot.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake tore fissures in the hills above town, and Los Gatans opened their homes to refugees.
The 1985 fire in the mountains threatened the entire town and caused the greatest assembly of fire equipment in state history. The killer rainstorm of 1982 did not cause major damage to Los Gatos, thanks to a series of dams created to govern water running San Francisco Bay-ward down Los Gatos Creek. At the outset of the storm, mighty Lexington Reservoir was standing almost empty and ready to back up runoff. Furthermore, San Jose Water Company dams, higher in the mountains, were doing their job.
Founded in 1866, with a single downtown well, San Jose Water Works grew in size and came to Los Gatos and bought out Mountain Springs Water Company for $20,000 cash and $24,000 stock in the San Jose company.
As early as 1874, some 7,000 acres of watershed land were acquired in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and numerous impounding reservoirs were built. The largest, Lake Elsman, was built in 1951 at a cost of $1.6 million on Austrian Creek. The dam was named for the company's aggressive leader, Ralph Elsman, and was the largest in the company's chain of reservoirs.
Prior to the building of Lexington Reservoir by Santa Clara Valley Water Conservation District in the 1950s, millions of gallons of water ran off to San Francisco Bay, often swamping parts of the valley floor.
Today, precious water is backed up and released gradually to percolation ponds.
Elsman, a native of Connecticut, devoted his entire life to public utilities. In 1918, he bought controlling interest in Kings County Lighting Co. in New York, sold it in 1925 and intended to become a Nevada cattle rancher but, instead, bought the company that held San Jose Water Works. He fought off a municipal attempt to take over the company and became its president in 1937.
Elsman's greatest accomplishment was the construction of Austrian Dam, which later was named for him.
A Los Gatos resident, Elsman personally financed Los Gatos Little League's first minor league division.
Mother Nature never naps for long. During the Loma Prieta earthquake of l989, major hunks of downtown Los Gatos were ripped asunder, and homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains were destroyed. It was learned that some homes were built on landslides of the not-too-distant past.
(Editor's note: Elsman's story is based on Clyde Arbuckle's History of San Jose.)
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, July 3, 1996.
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