Emergency morgue with bodies of victims of the flood that followed the failure of the Saint Francis Dam, Newhall (Calif.), 1928

Title: Emergency morgue with bodies of victims of the flood that followed the failure of the Saint Francis Dam, Newhall (Calif.), 1928
Date Created: March 1928
Date: 1928-03
Publisher: Los Angeles Times
Language: No linguistic content
Collection: Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection

Description: Bodies of twelve flood victims enshrouded in sheets and resting on inclined wooden boards in an improvised morgue in Newhall.
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.
Temporary morgues for flood victims were established and Piru, Santa Paula, Filmore, Oxnard, Newhall, Ventura and Bakersfield. Up to March 18, 273 bodies had been recovered.
The location of the morgue is provided in a hand drawn map published in the Los Angeles Times, 14 Mar. 1928: 2. The 1880's building was located at the northwest corner of Railroad Ave. and Market St. in Newhall. It had been the J. O. Newhall general store, the Gulley-Swall general store, the El Dorado saloon and, at the time of the flood, the Hap-A-Lan dance club. After its use as a morgue it was torn down and in 1931 the county courthouse was built on the property.
Caption: Text from negative sleeve: Saint Francis Dam

Genre: cellulose nitrate film
news photographs
Location: Newhall (Calif.)
Longitude: 34.378986
Latitude: -118.527482
Resource type: still image
Subjects: Saint Francis Dam Failure, Calif., 1928
Dead persons--California--Los Angeles
Disaster relief--California--Newhall
Morgues & mortuaries--California--Newhall

Repository: University of California, Los Angeles. Library. Department of Special Collections
Local Identifier: uclamss_1429_1899
ARK: ark:/21198/zz002dcsft
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 .