Agricultural field with mud and plant debris after the flood caused by the failure of the Saint Francis Dam, Santa Clara River Valley (Calif.), 1928

Title: Agricultural field with mud and plant debris after the flood caused by the failure of the Saint Francis Dam, Santa Clara River Valley (Calif.), 1928
Date Created: March 1928
Publisher: Los Angeles Times
Language: No linguistic content
Collection: Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection

Description: View of plant debris and a muddy agricultural field with evenly spaced plantings beyond in the path of the flood caused by the failure of the Saint Francis Dam. A straight, elevated area in the background may be a road.
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.

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

Repository: University of California, Los Angeles. Library. Department of Special Collections
Local Identifier: uclamss_1429_1840
ARK: ark:/21198/zz002dcqdb
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 .