Catastrophic Failure

No, I am not referring to my graduate school experience. According to that knower of all things, Wikipedia, "A catastrophic failure is a sudden and total failure from which recovery is impossible...The term is most commonly used for structural failures."

One of the fun and totally distracting aspects of doing primary source research is encountering accounts of dramatic events of the past such as the failure of the St. Francis Dam. Completed in 1926, the dam was built to create a reservoir for the city of Los Angeles about forty miles to the south. 

As I was skimming the Thirtieth Biennial Report of the Department of Public Health of California for the Fiscal Years from July 1, 1926, to June 30, 1928, I stopped at the headline "Sanitation in the St. Francis Dam Disaster" (20). By itself, the event would probably have piqued my curiosity anyway, but in the context of the recent troubles with the nearby Oroville Dam, I was instantly sucked into reading more about what happened. The dam, "impounding more than 12 billion gallons of water...of concrete construction had a maximum height of 205 feet, was 700 feet long, and 175 feet thick at its base." Again, according to Wikipedia:

Two and a half minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam catastrophically failed. There were no surviving eyewitnesses to the collapse. 

The estimated death toll was finally determined to be 431, although many bodies were never found. The health department expressed some relief that the dam broke relatively close to the ocean and flowed down a dry river bed that was also relatively uninhabited.

You can go down your own rabbit hole and read more about the disaster and see some interesting pictures of the before and after here.