TOUR EXPLORES '28 DISASTER SITE; RESERVOIR REMNANTS STILL VISIBLE.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

Every day, hundreds of cars snake along a two-lane canyon road past the site of the state's second-deadliest disaster, and odds are few passers-by know it's there or could spot it if they did.

On Saturday, two busloads of visitors made a pilgrimage into San Francisquito Canyon to tour the spot where the St. Francis Dam failed 70 years ago, killing an estimated 450 people. The midnight dam burst unleashed a wave that roared down the canyon, carving a wide, hellish swath that stretched 54 miles southwest by sunrise on March 13, 1928.

Frank Rock, a member of the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society, led the three-hour tour, a fund-raiser that drew more than 100 visitors to sites on San Francisquito Canyon Road in the Angeles National Forest.

``What happened that night was tragic beyond belief,'' Rock told the group during the first stop, at Powerhouse No. 2, an electrical generating station run by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which built and operated the St. Francis Dam. All but three of the DWP workers and family members who lived near Powerhouse No. 2, below the dam, died in the 12-billion gallon flood that emptied the reservoir.

``The dam (burst) drained its lake in an hour,'' Rock told the crowd.

Further north, the group hiked through dense vegetation to the crest of a bluff, still embedded with concrete rubble and rusted steel reinforcement bars from the ``wing dike'' along the dam's western bank. Rock directed visitors' attention to the cross-sections of broken pieces of concrete, where stones and pebbles are visible in the mix.

Over the years, many historians and geologists have cited porous characteristics of the concrete's composition as one flaw of the dam's design, Rock said.

In 1978, a bronze plaque to commemorate the disaster's 50th anniversary was installed on a hilltop leading to the wing dike, but the marker was relocated to Powerhouse No. 2 because vandals had defaced it, Rock added.

As visitors climbed atop several-ton chunks that had once been part of the dam's face and the reservoir's perimeter, Rock recounted harrowing stories of those who perished in the flood, victims whose bodies never were recovered or who washed ashore as far away as San Diego and the Channel Islands.

Some people survived by riding rooftops, spread-eagled, along the raging current.

One worker, en route to his graveyard shift at Powerhouse No. 1 a few miles above the dam, heard a rumbling and assumed an earthquake or landslide had occurred in the area he had just driven past on his motorcycle. When the worker reached the plant minutes later, it became clear he had narrowly missed death. ``Ace Hopwell realized he was the last person alive to see the St. Francis Dam in one piece,'' Rock said.

It was the human toll, and the stories about the fates of victims and survivors alike, that resonated strongest with a Woodland Hills woman who took Saturday's tour.

``The randomness of survival - some people were just thrown up on the hillside and survived,'' said Margie Carter, who came with her husband to see the ruins.

Mitch Carter said he and his wife had come to San Francisquito Canyon last year, searching for the dam remnants that lie in the creek bed, several yards from the northbound lane of the canyon road. But the craggy concrete boulders, weathered and obscured by 70 years of erosion, vegetation growth and exposure to the elements, are easy for the untrained eye to miss.

``I think it's remarkable that this site (is not marked) on any Los Angeles County map,'' Mitch Carter noted.

``You always hear about the San Francisco earthquake and fire,'' she added, referring to California's deadliest disaster. ``But you never hear about this.''

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3 Photos

PHOTO (1) Frank Rock leads a tour of the former St. Francis Dam on Saturday. The structure collapsed on March 12, 1928, killing 450 people.

(2) Tour participants examine weathered rubble that was once part of the dam in San Francisquito Canyon. The dam failed in 1928.

(3) A vintage photograph provides clues to where the dam once was for members of a historical tour visiting the canyon site Saturday.

Tom Mendoza/Daily News