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The St Francis Dam Disaster
🕑 Added 2022-04-12 10:16:00 +0000 UTCIn terms of the area affected, this has to be one of the biggest disasters I've ever covered. It's extraordinary how much material there is out there; thousands of people were lucky enough to survive, and every one of them had a story to tell.
You can find some of those stories here, on the St Francis Dam Memorial website, where extracts from many newspapers of the time are archived.
There's the story of "Old Man Koffer" who miraculously survived by clinging to his mattress as it was swept away. Or there's G P Boardman ("one of the best known men in the Fillmore-Bardsdale district") who survived when some of this family did not, simply because he'd stepped out of the house just a moment before the disaster.
Comments
Fascinating Horror
Thank you for watching! I'm hoping to make more in the future, and will be posting them over here as well.
Fascinating Horror
Thanks for this suggestion - it's one that I hadn't heard about before. There's a big push here in the UK to stop people texting while driving. Pretty shocking to think someone would do that whilst in charge of a train!
Thanks for the short on YouTube!
NagaNos
Speaking of disasters in the LA area, a more recent one worth covering would be the 2008 Chatsworth train collision. It's considered to be one the deadliest train accidents in the history of California. The accident was caused by the engineer of a Metrolink commuter train being distracted with phone calls and text messages, and served as the impetus for US Congress to pass the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which required that most of the mainline rail network in the US be equipped with Positive Train Control by 2015, a process that would take until 2020 to complete.
