The St. Francis Dam Disaster | Flood in the Desert | American Experience | PBS
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- čas přidán 29. 04. 2022
- At two and a half minutes before midnight on the 12th of March 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, sending 12 billion gallons of water rushing towards the ocean with thousands of people in its path. It was one of the worst civil engineering disasters in American history, rooted in a national drive to harness Nature and remake the West.
Official Website: to.pbs.org/3iRfHs7 | #FloodInTheDesertPBS
Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, about 40 miles north of Los Angeles, one of the biggest dams in the country blew apart, releasing a wall of water 20 stories high. Ten thousand people lived downstream. Flood in the Desert tells the story of the St. Francis Dam disaster, which not only destroyed hundreds of lives and millions of dollars’ worth of property; it also washed away the reputation of William Mulholland, the father of modern Los Angeles, and jeopardized larger plans to transform the West. A self-taught engineer, the 72-year-old Mulholland had launched the city’s remarkable growth by building both an aqueduct to pipe water 233 miles from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the St. Francis Dam, to hold a full year’s supply of water for Los Angeles. Now Mulholland was promoting an immense new project: the Hoover Dam. The collapse of the St. Francis Dam was a colossal engineering and human disaster that might have slowed the national project to tame the West. But within days a concerted effort was underway to erase the dam’s failure from popular memory.
In exploring the shocking outpouring of hatred and resentment in wartime Los Angeles, this film teaches us about race relations in the United States today.
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If you find this interesting be sure to read Jon Wilkman’s book Floodpath. The amount of work and detail he put into it is staggering.
Yes great book.
One interesting general aspect of the St. Francis Dam situation is how the modern Castaic Dam is located 2 drainages west of the Santa Clara River. It's a larger dam and a larger storage reservoir than the pre-failure St. Francis Dam. Also, unlike the rigid concrete St. Francis Dam, Castaic Dam is an earthen structure, like most modern dams. As built, earthen dams are self-healing, which is necessary in earthquake country. FYI, Castaic Dam is about 10 miles SSW of the main San Andreas Fault trace. An earthen dam was not common in 1928, and earthquakes and California geology were still on the early part of the learning curve.
Cannot wait to watch this!!
Who's the narrator?
Andre Braugher
@@fortis3686 👍👍
Damn...quite a teaser.
At least 500 deaths? Some tease.
Did anyone think of, oh, I don't know, opening the dam?
I have no knowledge of this dam so maybe that wasn't a possibility. But it should have been.
The dam wasn't built to "open". The dam was a solid concrete, with some bypass design, but that wasn't the problem. The failure was initially in its eastern abutment...a siting mistake. As abutment failure allowed distorting stresses on the rigid dam, fatal cracks begin to appear.
@@candidone8544 all this time I thought dams were for energy. I learned something!!
The Santa Clara River watershed is not a desert. Dumb title
Yeah, it's not. It looks like a desert to people who have never seen an actual desert though.
@@veggiedisease123 Its located in the Santa Clarita Valley its on the edge of the desert.
@@brightlight1012 Nope. Santa Clarita Valley is in the San Gabriel Mtns., a main part of California's Transverse Ranges; east-west features which split LA County into the Antelope Valley (north) and the Greater LA Basin (south). The "edge of the desert" misconstrues the reality of a mountain range topping 10,000-ft. within LA Co. Of course, those mountains have a rain shadow, the western flank of the Mojave, but they also provide LA with an annuall average rainfall of 15 inches...not desert.
@@veggiedisease123 Santa Clarita Valley is in the midst of the Greater San Gabriel Mtns., surrounded by Angeles National Forest. It's actually between Castaic (north) and Newhall (south), which aren't near desert. Beyond Castaic is the Gorman and the I-5 & Hwy 138 intersection, the gateway to the Antelope Valley and the western flank of the Mojave Desert. But the Sierra Pelona, a subrange of the San Gabriel Mtns. and the host of Castaic Lake, is a major barrier between the Santa Clara River and any desert.
It's within the Greater San Gabriel Mtns, surrounded by Angeles National Forest. At least one subrange of the Transverse Ranges separates that drainage from the Antelope Valley, the western flank of the Mojave Desert, the rain shadow of the Transverse Ranges.