Throngs seeking to identify victims in a temporary morgue after the failure of the Saint Francis Dam and resulting flood, Newhall (Calif.), 1928

Item Overview

Title

Throngs seeking to identify victims in a temporary morgue after the failure of the Saint Francis Dam and resulting flood, Newhall (Calif.), 1928

Date Created

March 14, 1928

Date

1928-03-14

Publisher

Los Angeles Times

Language

No linguistic content

Collection

Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection

Notes

Description

The location of the morgue is provided in a hand drawn map published in the Los Angeles Times, 14 Mar. 1928: 2. The 1880's building was located at the northwest corner of Railroad Ave. and Market St. in Newhall. It had been the J. O. Newhall general store, the Gulley-Swall general store, the El Dorado saloon and, at the time of the flood, the Hap-A-Lan dance club. After its use as a morgue it was torn down and in 1931 the county courthouse was built on the property.
The St. Francis Dam was a 200-foot high concrete gravity-arch dam built between 1924 and 1926 in St. Francisquito Canyon (near present-day Castaic and Santa Clarita). The dam collapsed on March 12, 1928 at two and a half minutes before midnight. The resulting flood killed more than 600 residents plus an unknown number of itinerant farm workers camped in San Francisquito Canyon, making it the 2nd greatest loss of life in California after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It is considered the worst American civil engineering failure in the 20th century.
Temporary morgues for flood victims were established and Piru, Santa Paula, Filmore, Oxnard, Newhall, Ventura and Bakersfield. Up to March 18, 273 bodies had been recovered.
People gathered on the deep front porch of a temporary morgue.

Caption

Text from newspaper caption: Relatives Seek to Identify Dead: Sorrowful Task Engages Survivors. Crown await to enter improvised morgue at Newhall. [Los Angeles Times, 17 Mar. 1928: 5]
Text from negative sleeve: Saint Francis Dam

Physical Description

Extent

1 photograph

Medium

b&w nitrate negative

Keywords

Genre

cellulose nitrate film
news photographs

Location

Newhall (Calif.)

Longitude

34.378985

Latitude

-118.527114

Resource type

still image

Subjects

Morgues & mortuaries--California--Newhall
Saint Francis Dam Failure, Calif., 1928
Disaster relief--California--Newhall