Access to this collection is generously supported by Arcadia funds. View of six little girls in an open area in front of a relief camp with 20 visible tents. Three more children and a man are in the background, 4 (water?) tanks are behind the camp and mountains are in the distance. 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. Text from negative sleeve: Saint Francis Dam
Type
image
Format
b&w nitrate negative
Identifier
uclamss_1429_1950 ark:/21198/zz002dcv65
Language
No linguistic content
Subject
Saint Francis Dam Failure, Calif., 1928 Disaster victims--California--Santa Clara River Valley Disaster relief--California--Santa Clara River Valley
Source
Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection OpenUCLA Collections
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