It Was 80 Years Ago Today - The St. Francis Dam Disaster

Other areas of the world have had worse things happen, on the land that they currently live on...this one is mine.

80 years ago tonight at 3 minutes to midnight, the St. Francis Dam gave way. A wall of water rushed down San Francisquito Canyon, where I live, killing over 450 people, as it tore its way down from just above present day Santa Clarita, to the sea...via Fillmore, Santa Paula and ultimately, Ventura. It is still considered the 2nd worst disaster in California history, surpassed only by the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and it is the worst Civil Engineering failure ever. Yet, most residents have no clue that it is literally right up the Canyon from us and history almost totally ignores it. The one part of the disaster that people might have reason to remember, is that after the dam collapsed, the career of William Mulholland was basically over. Mulholland, is the person who Mulholland Drive is named after and the man who brought water from the Owen's Valley, to Los Angeles. He never recovered from the mistakes he made that day.

When my Husband and I moved into Santa Clarita, we lived in a Mobile Home Park for the first 5 years of our marriage. Our neighbors were a much older couple and we got along very well with them. He had worked for the Department of Water and Power and would tell us stories of coming up from L.A. and eating at the Saugus Cafe, on the way up to the Owen's Valley and such. Several times he mentioned that he would be in the company of William Mulholland. We never thought much of it, until one time when he started talking about a certain trip and I remember turning to my husband and saying, "He's talking about the St. Francis Dam". I believe that my neighbor was one of the people who went up the Canyon with Mulholland, on that final day and bore witness to the inspection of the leak in the dam. It brought a human face to the dry facts of the Disaster. Many local papers have remembrance stories this week, but I just will highlight our local version. Click the link to read it.
============
Photo 1 is a capture
of a Google Map search
from the north end of
Santa Clarita (A), up to
the dam site (B). You can
see it is not far from
the area I live in.
Note, that on the very
far left of the image,
under the zoom in and out
feature, is the very top
of present day, Castaic
Lake. Over to the far right,
just off the edge of the picture,
is Bouquet Reservoir. In case of
catastrophic failure, the water from
that dam, would come crashing down San
Francisquito River Canyon.
Good thing I live on
a mountain...
If you follow the road that
is going east and west,
at the bottom of the map,
just about a quarter mile
further, to the river bed
itself, you can see where
I took photo 2.

Photo 2 is of the San
Francisquito River, right
by where I live, looking
north toward where the
dam used to be. Obviously,
the dam site is 7 miles up
that canyon.