Remaining center portion of the Saint Francis Dam shortly after its cataclysmic failure, San Francisquito Canyon (Calif.), 1929

Item Overview

Title

Remaining center portion of the Saint Francis Dam shortly after its cataclysmic failure, San Francisquito Canyon (Calif.), 1929

Date Created

March 1928

Date

1928-03

Publisher

Los Angeles Times

Language

No linguistic content

Collection

Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection

Notes

Description

Remaining center portion of the Saint Francis Dam shortly after its cataclysmic failure. Water level marks are visible on the dam wall, starting with 1690, and moving up in 5 foot increments. Three cables along the inner face of the dam wall area visible, 2 attached to metal covers that appear to be designed to move up and down against the face of the dam within rectangular frames.
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 negative sleeve: Saint Francis Dam

Physical Description

Extent

1 photograph

Medium

b&w nitrate negative

Keywords

Genre

cellulose nitrate film
news photographs

Location

San Francisquito Canyon (Calif.)

Longitude

34.546944

Latitude

-118.5125

Resource type

still image

Subjects

Dam failures--California--San Francisquito Canyon
Saint Francis Dam Failure, Calif., 1928
Saint Francis Dam (Calif.)