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The St. Francis Dam National Memorial Foundation is a non-profit organization, established in 2019, with the goal of raising funds to support the United States Forest Service in building and maintaining the St. Francis Dam Disaster National Memorial and Monument, including the construction of a visitor center and a memorial wall with the names ...
William Mulholland (September 11, 1855 – July 22, 1935) was an Irish American self-taught civil engineer who was responsible for building the infrastructure to provide a water supply that allowed Los Angeles to grow into the largest city in California.
Between 1924 and 1926, the canyon was the site of the construction of the St. Francis Dam. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began filling a reservoir in the San Francisquito Canyon in 1926. At 11:57 pm on March 12, 1928, the dam catastrophically failed, and the resulting flood took the lives of at least 431 people.
The St. Francis Dam was built on San Francisquito Creek in San Francisquito Canyon, and completed in 1926. It was part of the Los Angeles Aqueduct system, creating a storage reservoir for the imported Owens Valley water. The dam failed in 1928, due to a then undetectable geological weakness in the bedrock.
Around midnight on March 12, 1928, the 195 foot St. Francis Dam in the San Francisquito Canyon above what is now the city of Santa Clarita in California failed catastrophically. At least 431 people were killed as the 47,000,000 m 3 reservoir emptied into the Pacific Ocean near Oxnard, nearly 50 miles away. [ 34 ]
Within days after the collapse of the St. Francis Dam in March 1928, William Mulholland ordered the Hollywood Reservoir lowered due, in part, to public fears of a repeat disaster. Shortly after the disaster and in the years following, several engineering panels met to discuss the safety of the dam.
The resulting St. Francis Dam was completed in 1926 and created a reservoir capacity of 38,000 acre-feet (47,000,000 m 3). On March 12, 1928, the dam catastrophically failed, sending a 100-foot high (30 m) wall of water down the canyon, ultimately reaching the Pacific Ocean near Ventura and Oxnard, and killing at least 431 people.
The failure and near complete collapse of the St. Francis Dam took place in the middle of the night on March 12, 1928. The dam was holding a full reservoir of 12.4 billion gallons (47 billion liters) of water that surged down San Francisquito Canyon and emptied into the Santa Clara River, flowing down the river valley to the ocean.