Concrete dam debris in the path of the flood following the failure of the Saint Francis Dam, San Francisquito Canyon (Calif.), 1928

Title: Concrete dam debris in the path of the flood following the failure of the Saint Francis Dam, San Francisquito Canyon (Calif.), 1928
Date Created: March 14, 1928
Date: 1928-03-14
Publisher: Los Angeles Times
Language: No linguistic content
Collection: Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection

Description: View of a huge concrete remnant of the Saint Francis Dam in the path of the flood following the failure of the dam in San Francisquito Canyon. Steps of the face of the dam are visible on the left side of the concrete boulder. The block is approximately 63 feet long, 30 feet high, and 54 feet wide.
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.
Title from photo page: Officials Start Investigation to Determine Cause of Dam Disaster [Los Angeles Times, 15 March 1928: 12]
Caption: Text from negative sleeve: Saint Francis Dam
Text from newspaper caption: Huge Concrete Block Weighing Thousands fo Pounds, Washed Three-quarters of Mile from Dam (Times photo.) [Los Angeles Times, 15 March 1928: 12]

Genre: news photographs
cellulose nitrate film
Location: San Francisquito Canyon (Calif.)
Resource type: still image
Subjects: Saint Francis Dam Failure, Calif., 1928
Dam failures--California--San Francisquito Canyon
Environment
Disaster
Flood damage--California--San Francisquito Canyon

Repository: University of California, Los Angeles. Library. Department of Special Collections
ARK: ark:/21198/zz002dctkc
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 .