Hi all,
Thanks, Lin, for bringing up the L. A. Grim Society, and thanks Kim for finding the archived site page. As a major supporter of both society and grimness, I am sorry to see that this organization apparently no longer exists. I was also intrigued that the founder is a big fan of the 1928 St. Francis dam disaster, as I am (I mean that I'm a fan of STUDYING it, not the fact that it happened. That would be cruel).
I wonder if anyone can throw some light on this question: Over the years I have heard many estimates of the total death toll from the dam collapse and flood. 450 seems to be the low estimate, but it seems to be pretty well established that there were hundreds of undocumented farm workers camping in the Santa Clara river bottom along the many miles between the dam and the river's mouth at Ventura. So I've heard estimates that as many as 2000 may have died, but many remained unknown because they had no papers. Does anyone have recent information about this?
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