Flooded road and surrounding area following the failure of the Saint Francis Dam, Santa Clara River Valley (Calif.), 1928
Item Overview
- Title
- Flooded road and surrounding area following 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
Notes
- Description
-
Flooded road, lined with power utility poles, and surrounding area after the flood water had subsided following the failure of the Saint Francis Dam. A man stands on a dry patch of land next to a police man standing on the running board of an automobile. On either side of the road are open fields with a few small buildings in the distance. A billboard sign advertising a brand of cigar reads "Foiled For You, El Sidelo, 10¢, Also, 2 for 25¢."
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.
Physical Description
- Extent
- 1 photograph
- Medium
- b&w nitrate negative
Find This Item
- Repository
- University of California, Los Angeles. Library. Department of Special Collections
- Local Identifier
- uclamss_1429_1844
- ARK
- ark:/21198/zz002dcqjd
- Manifest url
Access Condition
- 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 .