Former location of the Saint Francis Dam shortly after the dam had failed, San Francisquito Canyon (Calif.), 1928

Item Overview

Title

Former location of the Saint Francis Dam shortly after the dam had failed, San Francisquito Canyon (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

Notes

Description

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.
View of the former location of the Saint Francis Dam in the days after the dam had failed, releasing a catastrophic flood. The remaining wing dike, visible on the ridge on the left (west of the dam), was not very tall, but was built to hold back 10 or 20 more feet of water than the dam was originally designed for. Two men are at the base of the ridge and two other men are on elevated ground in the background. They are in wearing suits and hats and are probably civil engineers and geologists who participated in governmental investigations of the dam failure.

Caption

Text from negative sleeve: Saint Francis Dam

Physical Description

Extent

1 photograph

Medium

b&w nitrate negative

Keywords

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