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I've been getting interested in this disaster, California's second most costly (after the 1906 SF earthquake and fire). I read about it some years ago, but just recently found out it happened near where I go to scout and hunt. As a matter of fact, I've been up on top of the big rock in the picture:
I'm thinking about going out to find the actual site, I understand there's still a piece of the dam left. As I understand it, it's very close to "A Place to Shoot" which would have been under water when the lake was there.
Does anybody know more about this?
Minutes before midnight on the chilly evening of March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam failed. The dam's 185-foot high concrete wall crumpled and collapsed, sending billions of gallons of raging flood waters down San Francisquito Canyon, about five miles northwest of Magic Mountain in what is now Santa Clarita. As the flood picked up debris it became a giant thick snake of mud and water and houses and bodies crawling at about 12 miles per hour down the Santa Clara River valley and eating everything in its 54 mile path to the Pacific Ocean.
My neighbor was just talking about it last week. He used to play in the creek bed as a child and he said there were still big chunks of concrete there. I used to shoot up in the canyon but I don't remember if I saw pieces of the dam. There is book about it in the library here that we both read. I read it years ago and don't remember to much except that it was a very destructive event. You could probably find it in the LA library system too.
I think Mulholland was the designer. If I remember right it failed because the ends were not correctly tied to the bedrock. He never recovered from the disaster himself.
Mulholland was the designer and it was later learned that there was a fault that they could not have know about it under the dam and he was later absolved of blame but it did destroy him.
In the High Desert of Southern Calif. ..."on the cutting edge of going back in time"...
Is this the dam that failed and took out the barbed wire factory, then the oil slick on top caught on fire and burned everyone tangled in the barbed wire?
El Chivo. i was a crewman on helicopters that flew over the dam site often. yes, you can see
parts of the dam where it was against the hills. i found it to be a chilling (?) site. i now live
close to where the waters met the ocean.
I used to live at the mouth of San Francisquito Cyn, right near where the Harey Carey ranch was located (and where yet another subdivision exists today). I have hiked, biked and panned up and down San Francisquito Cyn a few times, and driven it countless times. There are definitely some chunks of concrete up the bed of the canyon, but I never noticed anything really impressive, like huge concrete boulders or anything that just made my jaw drop. Maybe I missed the larger debris higher up the walls of the canyons, but I didn't have the aerial perspective.
