Houses damaged and destroyed by the flood following the failure of the Saint Francis Dam, Santa Clara River Valley (Calif.), 1928
Item Overview
- Title
- Houses damaged and destroyed by the flood following the failure of the Saint Francis Dam, Santa Clara River Valley (Calif.), 1928
- Date Created
- [March 1928]
- Date
- 1928-03
- Language
- No linguistic content
- Collection
- Harry French Blaney Papers, 1919-1970
Notes
- Description
-
View of a wooden house destroyed and another damaged by the flood following the failure of the Saint Francis Dam; only the roof of one is left, lying on the ground. A worker stands beside a pile of strewn tree debris.
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.
Physical Description
- Extent
- 1 photographic negative
- Medium
- b&w nitrate negative
Find This Item
- Repository
- University of California, Los Angeles. Library. Department of Special Collections
- ARK
- ark:/21198/zz002jk8q2
- Manifest url
Access Condition
- Rights statement
- copyrighted
- Rights contact
- 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
- Funding Note
- Access to this collection is generously supported by Arcadia funds.