Explore the story of the March 1928 collapse of the St. Francis Dam, the second deadliest disaster in California history. The flood killed more than 400 people, destroyed millions of dollars of property and washed away the reputation of William Mulholland, one of Southern California’s most celebrated men. A self-taught engineer, Mulholland had ensured the remarkable growth of Los Angeles by building an aqueduct that piped water from the Owens Valley across the Mojave Desert, 233 miles away. But the bursting of his St. Francis Dam, which formed the city’s largest single reservoir, was a colossal engineering and human failure.