H. A. Van Norman and Stanley Dunham, Saint Francis Dam engineers, look over the destruction of the flood caused by the failure of the dam, Santa Clara River Valley (Calif.), 1928

Title: H. A. Van Norman and Stanley Dunham, Saint Francis Dam engineers, look over the destruction of the flood caused by the failure of the dam, Santa Clara River Valley (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: Photograph of H. A. Van Norman, in car, and Stanley Dunham, standing next to car with folded paper in his hand, in the vicinity of the path of the flood that followed the failure of the Saint Francis Dam. Van Norman and Dunham were engineers who worked on the dam.
Title from photo page: Officials Start Investigation to Determine Cause of Dam Disaster [Los Angeles Times, 15 March 1928: 12]
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.
Caption: Text from newspaper caption: H. A. Van Norman, Assistant Chief Engineer of Bureau of Water and Power, and Stanley Dunham, Construction Engineer Who Build Dam, Look Over the Destruction. (Times photo.) [Los Angeles Times, 15 March 1928: 12]
Text from negative sleeve: Saint Francis Dam

Genre: cellulose nitrate film
news photographs
Names: Dunham, Stanley, 1886-1952
Van Norman, H. A. (Harvey Arthur), 1878-1954
Location: Santa Clara River Valley (Calif.)
Resource type: still image
Subjects: Civil engineers--California--San Francisquito Canyon
Saint Francis Dam Failure, Calif., 1928

Repository: University of California, Los Angeles. Library. Department of Special Collections
Local Identifier: uclamss_1429_1935
ARK: ark:/21198/zz002dctpx
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 .