Synopsis
Documentation of the destruction of the St Francis Dam.
Uploader's description on archive.org
Details
- Running time
- 8 minutes
- Collection
- Prelinger Archives
Reviews on the Internet Archive
★★★★★ · Fascinating · cahuenga1712 · 2013-01-14
Fascinating silent documentary combines actual newsreel footage with scale model special effects to dramatize the collapse of the St. Francis dam, which was designed L.A. Dept. of Water & Power's chief engineer William Mulholland, and was built in a remote canyon 45 miles north of Los Angeles. Shortly before midnight on the night of March 12, 1928, the arched concrete gravity dam suffered a catastrophic structural failure and collapsed, sending approximately 12.5 billion gallons of water surging down San Francisquito Canyon toward the Santa Clarita River, obliterating a power station and…
★★★★★ · A Disaster (The dam, not the film) · The_Emperor_Of_Television · 2010-03-11
Very little remains of this infamous dam today, but even now, this is one of the most infamous disasters of all time. Partly bad design, partly the result of the limited kowledge of certain things at the time. In any case, though, this dam was a badly designed one compared with some others of the period, and this film is an excellent one. It features footage of the dam before it failed, re-creations using models of the disaster, footage from after the disaster, and footage of the reactions to the disaster. It's a short film and well worth watching.