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St. Francis Dam Disaster
San Francisquito Canyon & Floodpath

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

William and Edna Benner, the grandparents of Caroline Marshall, photographed on January 1, 1928 on top of the St. Francis Dam, shortly before the dam break. Photos courtesy of Caroline and Glenn Marshall.

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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CG2801: 300 dpi jpeg from original print

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