DockRat
11-28-2012, 09:00 PM
Found this St Francis Dam story interesting.
Read more and pics at this site.
Check out the video too. DR
http://www.owensvalleyhistory.com/ov_aqueduct1/st_francis_disaster.html
St. Francis Dam was built by the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply in 1925-26 as a curved concrete gravity dam, approximately 200 feet high in San Francisquito Canyon, about 5 miles northeast of what is now Magic Mountain, California. The stated purpose of the dam was to provide an additional 38,000 acre-feet of storage for Los Angeles - Owens River Aqueduct water in close proximity to Los Angeles. The dam failed catastrophically upon its first full filling, near midnight on March 12, 1928, killing at least 450 people in the San Francisquito and Santa Clara River valleys. It was the greatest American civil engineering failure in the twentieth century.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eZVSq28cE0
No one knows the true cost in lives lost, but it is estimated that more than 600 people were drowned, mangled by debris or impaled by trees when the concrete dam failed moments before midnight. The failed dam unleashed a wall of water that sped under cover of darkness from San Francisquito Canyon, located nearly five miles northeast of the Santa Clarita Valley, to the Pacific Ocean.
It snuck up on unsuspecting families, farmers, ranchers and laborers in their sleep during its 54-mile rampage along the Santa Clara River to the sea.
Don Grainger, an 86-year-old rancher in Fillmore, was 5 when it struck his family's Santa Paula dairy and walnut farm.
"I woke up hearing sirens. My mother was on the telephone, then turned to my father and said, ‘We have to get out of here because the dam broke,'" remembers Grainger.
With just the clothes on their backs, Grainger, his parents and his six brothers and sisters loaded into the family car and fled for high ground atop a nearby hill.
"There were people all up and down that hill just waiting to see what was going to happen," he said, adding that police were knocking on doors warning as many people as possible.
"What happened" was a 20-foot-high wall of water and debris moved through town, Grainger said.
"We couldn't see it, but we could hear it," said Grainger. One report said it sounded like 100 steam engines going off at the same time.
At daylight, Grainger and his family had their first look at the devastation.
"It was almost like what happens in war when you have so many people killed in a short period of time," said Grainger, a World War II Navy veteran. "There were bodies laid side by side at the mortuary that they dug out of the mud and were hosing off."
Among Granger's childhood memories is that of a flat-bed truck driving by with bodies stacked up like cordwood. Grainger's family lost everything, but he said they were lucky.
Entire families were wiped out when the dam broke in the early morning hours. Twelve billion gallons of water were released, creating a 125-foot-high wave that traveled down San Francisquito Canyon.
Over the course of five and a half hours, it flooded parts of the Santa Clarita Valley, then followed the Santa Clara River bed flooding Castaic, Fillmore, Bardsdale, Santa Paula and Montalvo, growing to about two miles wide and slowing to about 5 mph before finally emptying into the ocean near Ventura.
Bodies were found in the ocean as far as San Diego and Oxnard and continued to be recovered through the mid-1950s. Quarter-mile stretches of railroad tracks were literally turned upside down, and Powerhouse No. 2, which generated power for the city of Los Angeles, was completely destroyed.
Nearly 24,000 acres of prime land was washed away, devastating the local farming industry for years. Trees, bridges and homes were all wiped from their foundations.
http://www.the-signal.com/archives/10939/
http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o223/JTJTPhotos/Miscellaneous/StFrancisDam/StFrancis2_p01.jpg
http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg208/zeebya/stfrancisdam/sfd1csa.jpg
http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg208/zeebya/stfrancisdam/sfdamruinsc1.jpg
Read more and pics at this site.
Check out the video too. DR
http://www.owensvalleyhistory.com/ov_aqueduct1/st_francis_disaster.html
St. Francis Dam was built by the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply in 1925-26 as a curved concrete gravity dam, approximately 200 feet high in San Francisquito Canyon, about 5 miles northeast of what is now Magic Mountain, California. The stated purpose of the dam was to provide an additional 38,000 acre-feet of storage for Los Angeles - Owens River Aqueduct water in close proximity to Los Angeles. The dam failed catastrophically upon its first full filling, near midnight on March 12, 1928, killing at least 450 people in the San Francisquito and Santa Clara River valleys. It was the greatest American civil engineering failure in the twentieth century.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eZVSq28cE0
No one knows the true cost in lives lost, but it is estimated that more than 600 people were drowned, mangled by debris or impaled by trees when the concrete dam failed moments before midnight. The failed dam unleashed a wall of water that sped under cover of darkness from San Francisquito Canyon, located nearly five miles northeast of the Santa Clarita Valley, to the Pacific Ocean.
It snuck up on unsuspecting families, farmers, ranchers and laborers in their sleep during its 54-mile rampage along the Santa Clara River to the sea.
Don Grainger, an 86-year-old rancher in Fillmore, was 5 when it struck his family's Santa Paula dairy and walnut farm.
"I woke up hearing sirens. My mother was on the telephone, then turned to my father and said, ‘We have to get out of here because the dam broke,'" remembers Grainger.
With just the clothes on their backs, Grainger, his parents and his six brothers and sisters loaded into the family car and fled for high ground atop a nearby hill.
"There were people all up and down that hill just waiting to see what was going to happen," he said, adding that police were knocking on doors warning as many people as possible.
"What happened" was a 20-foot-high wall of water and debris moved through town, Grainger said.
"We couldn't see it, but we could hear it," said Grainger. One report said it sounded like 100 steam engines going off at the same time.
At daylight, Grainger and his family had their first look at the devastation.
"It was almost like what happens in war when you have so many people killed in a short period of time," said Grainger, a World War II Navy veteran. "There were bodies laid side by side at the mortuary that they dug out of the mud and were hosing off."
Among Granger's childhood memories is that of a flat-bed truck driving by with bodies stacked up like cordwood. Grainger's family lost everything, but he said they were lucky.
Entire families were wiped out when the dam broke in the early morning hours. Twelve billion gallons of water were released, creating a 125-foot-high wave that traveled down San Francisquito Canyon.
Over the course of five and a half hours, it flooded parts of the Santa Clarita Valley, then followed the Santa Clara River bed flooding Castaic, Fillmore, Bardsdale, Santa Paula and Montalvo, growing to about two miles wide and slowing to about 5 mph before finally emptying into the ocean near Ventura.
Bodies were found in the ocean as far as San Diego and Oxnard and continued to be recovered through the mid-1950s. Quarter-mile stretches of railroad tracks were literally turned upside down, and Powerhouse No. 2, which generated power for the city of Los Angeles, was completely destroyed.
Nearly 24,000 acres of prime land was washed away, devastating the local farming industry for years. Trees, bridges and homes were all wiped from their foundations.
http://www.the-signal.com/archives/10939/
http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o223/JTJTPhotos/Miscellaneous/StFrancisDam/StFrancis2_p01.jpg
http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg208/zeebya/stfrancisdam/sfd1csa.jpg
http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg208/zeebya/stfrancisdam/sfdamruinsc1.jpg