Access to this collection is generously supported by Arcadia funds. The St. Francis Dam was a 200-foot high concrete gravity-arch dam built between 1924 and 1926 in St. Francisquito Canyon (near present-day Castaic and Santa Clarita). The dam collapsed on March 12, 1928 at two and a half minutes before midnight. The resulting flood killed more than 600 residents plus an unknown number of itinerant farm workers camped in San Francisquito Canyon, making it the 2nd greatest loss of life in California after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It is considered the worst American civil engineering failure in the 20th century. View of the former location of the Saint Francis Dam in the days after the dam had failed, releasing a catastrophic flood. The remaining wing dike, visible on the ridge on the left (west of the dam), was not very tall, but was built to hold back 10 or 20 more feet of water than the dam was originally designed for. Two men are at the base of the ridge and two other men are on elevated ground in the background. They are in wearing suits and hats and are probably civil engineers and geologists who participated in governmental investigations of the dam failure. Text from negative sleeve: Saint Francis Dam
Type
image
Format
b&w nitrate negative
Identifier
uclamss_1429_1933 ark:/21198/zz002dctmw
Language
No linguistic content
Subject
Saint Francis Dam Failure, Calif., 1928 Dam failures--California--San Francisquito Canyon
Source
Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection OpenUCLA Collections
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