Exhuming California’s St. Francis Dam disaster
Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s St. Francis Dam collapsed, inundating the canyon below with some 12 billion gallons of water. The floodwaters, which in the darkness registered first as a mounting roar to those who were awake, tossed 10,000-ton fragments of the dam thousands of feet downstream and scoured the canyon walls to bare rock. More than 400 people in the flood’s 53-mile path to the sea were drowned or battered to death as the torrent sheared through orchards, pulverized buildings, and crumpled bridges.