Children in a relief camp for flood victims following the failure of the Saint Francis Dam, Santa Clara River Valley (Calif.), 1928

Title: Children in a relief camp for flood victims following the failure of the Saint Francis Dam, Santa Clara River Valley (Calif.), 1928
Date Created: March 1928
Date: 1928-03
Publisher: Los Angeles Times
Language: No linguistic content
Collection: Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection
OpenUCLA Collections

Description: 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.
Caption: Text from negative sleeve: Saint Francis Dam

Genre: cellulose nitrate film
news photographs
Location: Santa Clara River Valley (Calif.)
Resource type: still image
Subjects: Saint Francis Dam Failure, Calif., 1928
Disaster victims--California--Santa Clara River Valley
Disaster relief--California--Santa Clara River Valley

Repository: University of California, Los Angeles. Library. Department of Special Collections
Local Identifier: uclamss_1429_1950
ARK: ark:/21198/zz002dcv65
Manifest url

Rights statement: copyrighted
Rights Holder: UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, A1713 Young Research Library, Box 951575, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575. E-mail: spec-coll@library.ucla.edu. Phone: (310)825-4988
Rights Country: US
Funding Note: Access to this collection is generously supported by Arcadia funds.
License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License .