The St. Francis Dam Disaster | Flood in the Desert | American Experience | PBS скачать в хорошем качестве

The St. Francis Dam Disaster | Flood in the Desert | American Experience | PBS

At two and a half minutes before midnight on the 12th of March 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, sending 12 billion gallons of water rushing towards the ocean with thousands of people in its path. It was one of the worst civil engineering disasters in American history, rooted in a national drive to harness Nature and remake the West. Official Website: https://to.pbs.org/3iRfHs7 | #FloodInTheDesertPBS Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, about 40 miles north of Los Angeles, one of the biggest dams in the country blew apart, releasing a wall of water 20 stories high. Ten thousand people lived downstream. Flood in the Desert tells the story of the St. Francis Dam disaster, which not only destroyed hundreds of lives and millions of dollars’ worth of property; it also washed away the reputation of William Mulholland, the father of modern Los Angeles, and jeopardized larger plans to transform the West. A self-taught engineer, the 72-year-old Mulholland had launched the city’s remarkable growth by building both an aqueduct to pipe water 233 miles from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the St. Francis Dam, to hold a full year’s supply of water for Los Angeles. Now Mulholland was promoting an immense new project: the Hoover Dam. The collapse of the St. Francis Dam was a colossal engineering and human disaster that might have slowed the national project to tame the West. But within days a concerted effort was underway to erase the dam’s failure from popular memory. This program is made possible by viewers like you. Please support your local PBS stations: https://pbs.org/donate Subscribe to the American Experience | PBS channel for more clips:    / americanexperiencepbs   Enjoy full episodes of American Experience anytime, anywhere with the free PBS Video App: https://to.pbs.org/2QbtzhR FOLLOW US: Facebook:   / americanexperiencepbs   Twitter:   / amexperiencepbs   Instagram:   / americanexperiencepbs