Hikers took a guided tour of the St. Francis Dam ruins Saturday, a day before the 95th anniversary of the structure’s collapse.

On Saturday afternoon, a group of hikers watched a presentation about the St. Francis Dam collapse and took a guided tour held by the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society.

Zena Taher/KHTS News

“We’ve driven past this so many times and thought it was such a beautiful building and had looked into it a little on our own,” said Pam Shackleford, who attended the event with her husband. “We wanted to have a chance to come and visit it with people who really know the history and see it up close.”

Zena Taher/KHTS News

The tour marked the first held by the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society since the pandemic began.

“The tours are to keep the memory alive, because I think there is a memory within the community of the flood zone,” said Ann Stansell, who served as tour guide on the hike. “Largely, on a community, state, national level, people don’t remember.”

Ann Stansell gesturing toward where the “tombstone” ruins used to be located. Zena Taher/KHTS News

Stansell is on the board of the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society and the St. Francis Dam National Memorial Foundation.

“I’d been on this tour before,” said Ginny Connor, who was attending the event. “This is an interesting subject for me and one that I’ve read about and watched videos about.”

Hikers look at a large piece of rubble left over from the dam collapse. Zena Taher/KHTS News

Nearly 95 years ago, on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam broke and killed more than 400 people in Santa Clarita and in the surrounding area.

Around midnight, the dam broke and sent water down San Francisquito Canyon all the way through Castaic Junction, Santa Paula, Santa Clarita, Piru, Camulos, Bardsdale, Fillmore and Ventura before hitting the ocean between Oxnard and Ventura.

When the dam collapsed, it destroyed several homes and other types of property for 55 miles and about 37.5 square miles of farmland were entirely swept away due to the water break.

The death toll due to the disaster was estimated at around 450. Bodies were discovered miles away from where the water had originally hit them.

This is the second largest loss of life in a single disaster in California followed by the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 killing over 3,000 people.

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