St. Francis Dam Disaster
San Francisquito Canyon & Floodpath

[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][Fillmore Herald]

Floodplain of the St. Francis Dam disaster. Probably Castaic Junction where Interstate 5 and Highway 126 intersect today, looking east. Photos courtesy of Caroline and Glenn Marshall; shot by Caroline Marshall's grandparents on March 13, 1928.

Seven miles up San Francisquito Canyon Road from today's Copper Hill Drive, construction on the 700-foot-long, 205-foot-high St. Francis Dam started in August 1924. With a 12.5 billion-gallon capacity, the reservoir began to fill with water on March 1, 1926. It was completed two months later.

At 11:57:30 p.m. on March 12, 1928, the dam failed, sending a 180-foot-high wall of water crashing down San Francisquito Canyon. An estimated 431 people lay dead by the time the floodwaters reached the Pacific Ocean south of Ventura 5½ hours later.

It was the second-worst disaster in California history, after the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, in terms of lives lost — and America's worst civil engineering failure of the 20th Century.

---

CG2807: 300 dpi jpeg from original print