Aerial view of the coastline where flood waters from St. Francis Dam break reached the Pacific Ocean, Montalvo (Ventura vicinity), 1928

Item Overview

Title

Aerial view of the coastline where flood waters from St. Francis Dam break reached the Pacific Ocean, Montalvo (Ventura vicinity), 1928

Date Created

March 1928

Date

1928-03

Publisher

Los Angeles Times

Language

No linguistic content

Collection

Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection
OpenUCLA Collections

Notes

Description

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.

Caption

Text from negative sleeve: Dam/ Saint Francis.

Physical Description

Extent

1 photograph

Dimensions

10 x 12.5 cm.

Medium

b&w glass negative

Keywords

Genre

news photographs
glass plate negatives

Location

Montalvo (Calif.)

Resource type

still image

Subjects

Dam failures--California--San Francisquito Canyon
Flood damage--California--Santa Clara River Valley
Coastlines--California--Montalvo
Saint Francis Dam Failure, Calif., 1928