Men standing outside tents in the days following the failure of the Saint Francis Dam and resulting flood, Bardsdale (Calif.), 1928

Item Overview

Title

Men standing outside tents in the days following the failure of the Saint Francis Dam and resulting flood, Bardsdale (Calif.), 1928

Date Created

March 1928

Date

1928-03

Publisher

Los Angeles Times

Language

No linguistic content

Collection

Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection

Notes

Description

Men standing outside a rope cordoning off an area with tents in the days following the failure of the Saint Francis Dam and resulting flood. A sign in a tree on the right reads "Bardsdale Hdqtrs" with an arrow pointing to the left and a sign on a tent reads "Headquarters." There is a building partially visible on the left, a house behind the tents on the right, 2 parked automobiles and one truck. A sign on the truck reads "...studios ...corp. ...D. Brown...Generator [?] No. 1."
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.
Bardsdale is in the Santa Clara River Valley on the south side of the Santa Clara River near the town of Fillmore.

Caption

Text from negative sleeve: Saint Francis Dam

Physical Description

Extent

1 photograph

Medium

b&w nitrate negative

Keywords

Genre

cellulose nitrate film
news photographs

Location

Bardsdale (Calif.)

Resource type

still image

Subjects

Disaster relief--California--Bardsdale
Saint Francis Dam Failure, Calif., 1928