The Massive LA Disaster You've Never Heard Of

[hunter]

The St. Francis Dam was a concrete gravity dam located in San Francisquito Canyon in Los Angeles County, California, United States, built from 1924 to 1926 to serve Los Angeles's growing water needs. It catastrophically failed in 1928 due to a defective soil foundation and design flaws, triggering a flood that claimed the lives of at least 431 people. The collapse of the dam is considered to be one of the worst American civil engineering disasters of the 20th century and remains the second-greatest loss of life in California's history, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Dam

I've got some other connections and other accounts of the story, but this is a good one.

I like what she says about our obsession with progress.

"When progress itself is fetishized it becomes an end in and of itself, even if there's no real progression in the health, wealth, or well being of the people."

When all this was happening my dad's mom and her sister were running wild in Hollywood, having escaped the family dairy business. My grandma was born in San Francisco just after the great earthquake, her sister before. The family business was across the bay.

My dad's dad had escaped rural Montana by joining the Army Air Corp where they made him a mechanic. My mom's parents were cowboy ranchers who loved horses but hated cattle.

My wife's dad was born in a farm labor camp near a small orchard my parents used to own, not far from this disaster. They knew people lost.

It's all become the hobby ranches and farms of wealthy people these days.

My parents, me, and all my siblings fled years before the worst of that entropic money people degradation. If we'd had the sense to stay put we'd all be millionaires. So what. That would've been intolerable.

Ask a Mortician reminds me of my first serious girlfriend. She was "goth" before goth was a thing. Our first date movie was Eraserhead.

Compost your dead.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

1. I've heard of this.. having lived in LA for 30 years