St. Francis Dam Disaster Site

William Mulholland put this dam in San Francisquito Canyon because the aqueduct feeding Los Angeles crossed the San Andreas Fault and he wanted a reserve the city could not lose. It was finished in 1926. On the morning of March 12, 1928 the dam keeper, Tony Harnischfeger, reported muddy water leaking near the western abutment. Mulholland drove out, spent two hours on it, and concluded the silt was coming from road work nearby. The dam went just before midnight.

Twelve billion gallons came down the canyon and did not stop until the Pacific at Oxnard, some five hours and better than fifty miles later. The official death toll settled around four hundred and fifty. The real figure is unknown, because bodies went out to sea and a great many of the dead were migrant farm workers nobody had counted to begin with; remains were still being found in the 1990s. It is the second deadliest dam failure in American history and the worst civil engineering failure this country had in the twentieth century. The coroner's jury brought no charges but said plainly that no one man, however eminent, should be left to judge a municipal dam alone. Mulholland's career ended on that sentence. Blocks of the dam weighing thousands of tons still lie in the canyon below the site.