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St. Francis Dam Disaster
Floodpath

Photo: Rescue Party, March, 1928. Caption reads "RESCUE PARTY WORKING IN WAKE OF CALIFORNIA'S GREATEST DAM DISASTER".

Construction on the 600-foot-long, 185-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 470 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.

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AL2022: 9600 dpi jpeg from 300 dpi jpg of original photograph

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