Despite early morning rain, the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society did its annual St. Francis Dam lecture and tour on Saturday.
Attendees met at College of the Canyons in Valencia to learn about how the failure of the St. Francis Dam at midnight, March 12, 1928, killed more than 400 people, leveled farms and homesteads, and destroyed property and livestock. After the lecture, everyone loaded into two buses and went up into San Francisquito Canyon, and then they went on foot to see the remains of the dam.
According to local historian and St. Francis Dam expert Frank Rock, the St. Francis Dam disaster changed the way dam safety is addressed across the nation.
“That’s when they made the law that no dam can be built by the say-so of one person,” he told a room of almost 100 people. “It had to be done by a study of geologists, hydrologists, and not, like I said, one person.”
St. Francis Dam National Memorial Foundation president Alan Pollack and foundation vice president and executive director Dianne Hellrigel also shared stories, facts and myths about the dam and the disaster with attendees. The three historians began with the story of Los Angeles civil engineer William Mulholland’s quest to bring water to the arid land of 1920s L.A. and how his attempt to make it happen turned into the second worst disaster in California’s history.
Rock shared what he believed to be a myth regarding the eucalyptus trees planted along Highway 126 that were allegedly representative of the people that the waters had taken away in its path down the Santa Clara River, through Santa Paula, Fillmore and Bardsdale, and into the Pacific Ocean near Ventura at Montalvo.
Another possible myth Rock talked about was how, on the night of the dam disaster, Charles Richter, who developed the Richter scale, got a reading on his scale from Pasadena and thought the rumbling of water dumping out of the broken dam was an earthquake.
After Q&A with those in the room, everyone loaded into the buses and headed to the dam site. On the hike, Rock, Pollack and Hellrigel shared more history and pointed out cement pieces of the former dam that are still scattered throughout the canyon and other damage that’s still visible.
Attendees seemed fascinated with the stories they heard and what they were seeing.
Rodney Belcher and his wife, Candy Inglis, of Saugus were on the tour. They said they’d wanted to do it for about the last 20 years.
“Ever since we got married, we were wanting to do it,” Belcher said. “But every time we went online, it was sold out.”
Belcher said he and his wife are history buffs and were interested in learning more about the historic tragedy that occurred in their own community almost 100 years ago.
James Bennett, of Canyon Country, who was among those in the group on Saturday, said he’d heard about the lecture and tour from a friend of his who’s a member of the SCV Historical Society.
“We (Bennett and his wife) have only been here for about eight years,” Bennett said. “We moved out from Florida because grandkids. We hike every week, and we try to see all of the area. We’ve just grown to love it here. And this was part of it. I had to see this because this is a big part of the history here. What a mammoth event that was. And it impacted so many people’s lives.”
Shirley Kraft from the Leona Valley was on the tour with her 14-year-old grandson, Owen Spencer of Valencia. Kraft said she’d been following the Historical Society on social media for years and had always wanted to see the dam site. The first time she tried to do the lecture and tour it got cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Then it booked up quickly each year after it started back up.
Kraft added that she’d been fascinated with the history of the dam since she was a little girl. Her parents, who lived in the San Fernando Valley and knew of the story, used to talk about it and how it took so many lives.
Her grandson, Spencer, said he’d learned about the dam disaster from a class at North Park Elementary School. He’s currently at Rio Norte Junior High School, but that lesson he learned when he was younger stuck with him.
“I just took an interest in it,” he said. “And then my grandma said she was taking the tour and I thought, ‘Yeah.’”
According to Pollack, every year, more people become interested in the lecture and tour. It’s an important part of history, he said, but it can easily vanish.
He spoke of a memorial center that he and the foundation have been working on for over a decade. The idea, he said, was inspired by the center he visited in 2012 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where the South Fork Dam ruptured on May 31, 1889, and released 14.55 million cubic meters of water, killing more than 2,200 people.
Hellrigel was instrumental in lobbying for legislation in Washington and getting the national memorial designation in 2019.
In accordance with the act that made the designation possible, the secretary of agriculture, according to the memorial website, could establish a memorial at the St. Francis Dam site. In response to the act’s recommendations, the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service followed a similar planning and design process as those developed by the National Parks Service, and it opened the development of the memorial design to the public.
In March 2023, the Angeles National Forest, in cooperation with the St. Francis Dam National Memorial Foundation, announced the winners of a public competition for the design of a memorial center.
According to Pollack, not much has happened since. But he and others continue to push to make progress on the project and they continue to share the story, and conduct the annual tours, because they believe it’s an important part of local — even national — history.
“This was one of the biggest disasters in American history that has been mostly forgotten,” Pollack said. “And that’s really a shame that it’s not well known.”
