On the morning of March twelfth, nineteen twenty-eight, William Mulholland — the most powerful water engineer in Los Angeles — drove to the St Francis Dam to inspect a leak the dam keeper had reported. He examined the water seeping from the western side, decided it was not carrying foundation material, and left. The dam remained in service. That night, just before midnight, the dam failed. Twelve billion gallons of water tore through San Francisquito Canyon in the dark, destroying everything in its path for miles. More than four hundred people died. Some were never found.

In this episode of 5 Minute Strange, we cover the collapse of the St Francis Dam — the geology of the canyon walls that nobody had fully understood, the dam that had been raised during construction without widening its base to match, the dam keeper and his family who were among the first to die, and the flood that reached the Pacific Ocean hours later leaving broken concrete, destroyed towns, and hundreds of dead across the Santa Clara River Valley. Mulholland accepted responsibility publicly. His career never recovered.

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