A brief History of: The Baldwin Hills Disaster (Documentary) 

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Building a reservoir on top of a fault -- what could possibly go wrong?

Good on the caretaker for noticing and raising the alarm. Without him many more lives would likely be lost.

“it was thought that the asphalt membrane would still hold out any significant erosion”. … … have these people never seen a pothole?

i can totally imagine the chief engineer putting his hand on the giant reservoir and giving it a push and saying “that aint going anywhere” as he walked away proudly.

A reservoir on top of a hill traversed by an active fault line... It's like the dam designer thought in advance that someone far in the future would need materials to produces mini-documentaries about disasters, aired on a yet to be invented streaming service, running on a then inexistant worldwide computer network. That's what I call very advanced forward thinking!

In my opinion, the main cause of this failure is the ego of the chief engineer.

Only annoying thing about discovering this channel is that RU-vid keeps recommending other channels that do similar videos but most of the ones they recommend are crap. They use unrelated photos and their explanations are always covered in a thin layer of humor to prevent you from seeing how shallow their research was. This channel does it right. Thank you.

Basically the whole thing is reliant on a single big ass layer of clay, in loose soil below, and in the middle of an active fault line. Cant see why it wouldn't self destruct in a year

"We're going to build a new dam on top of the biggest hill we can find, right above a fault line, right next to an oil drilling operation, with a channel to funnel all the water directly into a neighborhood, and make it out of FUCKING CLAY"

It's possible to be a damn failure without causing death and destruction. Just look at me.

This seems to be a common problem behind dam failures. People raise concerns during the planning and design phase. The engineers have a fit and say there's nothing wrong and continue with their design. Only to have it fail spectacularly later on.

I'm thoroughly amused by the clever placement of the word "balls" throughout this channel. Well played sir. Cheers!

As soon as you said it was over a fault line, my immediate reaction was "Uhoh!".

"asphalt membrane would still hold any significant erosion."... Laughs in Californian

Your Videos are Medicin apparently. After watching your Video my Blood pressure went from 170/115 to 115/85. I am feeling much better now.

A bit of eyewitness history... I currently live in the house my great-grandmother moved into in 1947, built very near the Ballona Creek. This house is around 2 miles from the old reservoir site. When the dam failed in '63, one place where the water drained was into the Ballona Creek which is just downhill from the failure site. My great-grandmother said she remembered seeing debris floating down the creek past our house when the dam broke. Then in the late 1980s, I was college age and I used to go mountain biking in the old dam. I still remember the concrete tower and the 2 big mains, everything was covered with a layer of fine dirt and looked abandoned until around 1990 when they graded over the old dam lining, demolished the tower, and planted grass and trees in the bowl to make it part of Kenneth Hahn Park. Curiously enough, you can still hike down an old paved service road to the east of the bowl itself and see the old chlorinating station (it looks weirdly like a fast food joint) and a couple of old large mains which are now cut open and grated off. There's even an old cast iron wellhead painted bright grass green to warn the workers that it handled poisonous chlorine gas. Oh, the things you'll see when you go hiking around Kenneth Hahn Park...

"One of the first dam failures caught on TV" Well, I know what the next videos will be about.

Wow, I've been to the park where this used to be a ton (Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area) and had no idea! The exact place where the resevoir was is referred to as the "Village Green," a small shallow valley up at the top of a hill--with the grass way greener than the rest of the park. I was always amazed at how strange the geography was, and this explains everything. Amazing video, thank you!

Thank you for this one.. It was one I was hoping you would cover some day as I grew up in the area and was familiar with the dam and visited it often as a curious child. Even the house I grew up in had evidence of the mudflows in the crawlspace.

Ah this one... Not just poor site selections. It's also poor planning, poor everything. I need to find the live broadcast of it. There was a clip on Modern Marvels that always is fascinating to me.

I was an 11 year-old kid living on the west side of Los Angeles when this disaster occurred. I remember well the helicopter TV coverage. We weren't close enough to the disaster area to be affected by it, by it wasn't all that far away - maybe a 15 minute drive......

I feel like John/Plainly Difficult is someone I wanna have a beer with. He seems like the type of person that always has intelligent things to say therefore whenever your hanging out with him you'll inevitably learn something new.

"Oh, snap!" Without the caretaker...thousands of lives would've been lost!!!

I rode my bike to the top of dam that day. I was 13. I remember watching the water rush out, there was a LAPD motor officer and I up there. He was on a Harley, I had a Stingray. Funny the stuff you remember.

God: designs terrain that all but screams "don't build a dam here." LA Department of Water and Power: This looks like a great place for a dam!

I've noticed a neat little detail in Plainly Difficult's videos, that when an ad is about to play, there's a pause button icon in the video corner. I think it's a reminder of where ads should be placed in the video at parts that a break would make sense. Great video as always, Plainly Difficult!!

You could do the Brazilian Brumadinho dam failure next, idk if there's enough information out about it or if it's interesting enough for a video, but it's a suggestion

😮 this is just up the street from me! It's a disc golf course now.

Hello everyone, Hello Plainly Difficult, good to know the name of whom put that much thought into building it, but what is the name of the caretaker who has done a good job? I think it was never mentioned in the video. Greetings Juy Juka

I have realized I hang around at the end of the video just to find out what the weather is like in south east London. @Plainly Difficult needs to do some weather disasters so you can officially be my weatherman

I was 16 years old and went with my friend Richard to the intersection of Rodeo and LaBrea which was flooded and standing in the middle of the intersection broadcasting for KTLA news was Bill Welsh - famous local TV personality of the late 50s through the 60s.

Were the people killed workers or evacuees? I’m curious as to how they were killed if the government was effectively evacuating the citizens. Were they people who went back in against the request of the officials?

I like the idea of multiple scales. Along with legacy some scales could be added or split up. A few I can think of are: Cost of life Cost of damage Environmental impact Preventability Aftermath effects (long-term/short-term) Maybe they can be added up for the overall score.

This talk of oil drilling sending waste fluid down the wells reminds me of the earthquakes in Oklahoma and Arkansas that were tied directly to natural gas fracking doing the same thing with waste fluid.

My parents were lucky. They lived out there on Don Tomaso Drive... The other side from where the dam broke.

Wow - I remember seeing this on TV as it happened, (at age 9) and as an adult always wondered what the whole story was. Well done.

Thank you! As a former Baldwin Hills resident, I really appreciate this information. I moved out of Baldwin Hills when I was five years of age, three years prior to the disaster, but my former family's apartment and school would certainly have been affected by the flood. Great informative video!

There's an active fault there. I should build a dam on top of it and see what happens.

The water was just trying to reach them about their car's extended warranty.

How about this? Don't build a dam on a fault line - active or inactive.

Great Documentary! 😊👍👍 That was a bad design for sure, on an active fault line and asphalt is not exactly a strong barrier and clay neither 😒

I was 11 years old living in the LA area when this happen. I remember watching TV that day, LOL I was angry the tv station kept cutting away from the afternoon cartoon show. I remember them saying over and over "we expect the dam to hold, but as a safety measure we are asking local people to leave the area" Good timing the new news helicopter was flying over just as it broke. As this video pointed out news live and from the sky no less was fairly new. The image is still well remembered by me these 58 years later.

I'd never trust a surveyor guy who wears a hat like that.

If you ever cover the failure of the Castlewood Canyon dam in Colorado I'm happy to send you as many photos as you like of what the ruins look like today - I hike there a few times a month, it's very nearby to me. Excellent coverage, as always!

All that effort put in to a complicated system to prevent water seepage. Would it have killed them to just use a layer of concrete as a reservoir liner?

In Yankee: Teton, as in "Tea-tawn," equally emphasized. No slight intended, as an Americano who travels to Britain.

lol "acre-feet". The imperial system gets more ridiculous every unit.

love your channel. it's a great way to start a saturday. also, would you do the black hills flood of 1972? my mom lived through that...

You would think that engineers would be smart enough to realize that building a dam on a fault line is a big mistake, but no no...

Lets take hard to see footage and show it on a smaller tv screen

how often is a guy who refused criticism work at vital building that potentially can endanger a city?

KTLA has been the best news source in LA for many decades. Most recently, they were the only news station that caught the LAPD's botched fireworks explosion live on video from their helicopter. So it doesn't surprise me that they were the ones that filmed the dam failure in 1963.

I love how back in the day it was ok to just more or less ignore tectonic threats.

Didn't a dam near Nepal? Or India, which just gave way a cascade of water, broke about year ago?

Saturday morning viewing in the 1980s: Cartoons on TV Saturday morning viewing in the 2020s: A new Plainly Difficult disaster video on RU-vid

Thank you for the big red arrow in the thumbnail, I wouldn't have noticed the giant gap without it

I remember watching this on the local news, we lived in Hermosa Beach at the time. It was terrible.

about time the Caretaker did some good, Last I heard he had died after transporting Voyager 75,000 Light Years, and his partner was nuts and not helpful when Janeway found her...

Acre-foot has to be the dumbest unit of volume I have ever heard of.

I’m actually here early, nice. Always love your uploads.

Wow thanks... I live down the street from this park, visited a ton when I was a kid and never had any clue of its history. Alot of its features make a ton of sense now and the historical pictures are a trip to look at.

20 seconds into explaining the history of the dam and I already am saying "uh oh" and wondering how they ever decided to build it there. An earthquake fault? An inflexible arrogant leader? Design flaws? What could go wrong... 🤦‍♀ Only thing missing was to hear what Proctor's reaction was to the failure. 😁Thank you for another educational video! Cheers

By far this channel is becoming one of my favorites for all the info he covers and I greatly appreciate you taking your time to research all of these subject's and make the video interesting enough to watch the whole thing. Hats off to good sir. Keep em coming.

Note before you watch: DOES NOT SHOW THE VIDEO OF THE DAM BREAKING. just simple clip art plus a tv insert with 3 seconds of the original dam break

I remember seeing this happen on TV when I was a kid in LA back then. Having homes built directly below the dam, especially an earthen works dam, seems like a bad idea. Anyone buying a home below a dam should consider the threat, and if they don't, then they shouldn't be surprised if they are wiped out by a flood. Earthquakes in Southern California are not new, nor is the irresponsiblity of real estate developers. Earth dam, earthquakes, greed, houses in a ravine, gravity. Jeez! Really? But that's LA. People also had homes with shake shingle (wood) roofs, in brush fire prone areas, until the home insurance industry said "NOPE, wooden roof=no insurance! I watched lots of TV news coverage of houses with wood roofing burn down. Several times a year, every year. One whole neighborhood burned down in the early 80s, and people died, because of the wood roofs. On live TV.

Errrr.... Someone needs to look at The Periodic Table as "C" is NOT Calcium. Which would probably be represented by "Ca".....

Now we have the Florida condo disaster to show us...WE DON'T LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES

KTLA is the only local news station i follow as an Angeleno(a…?) Amazing relevant coverage….so interesting to learn that they were on top of the news game way back in 1963!

Happy Saturday! Another Plainly Difficult video!

Thanks for the history. As a kid we used to ride our bikes in those hills back in the 70s before they built Kenneth Hahn Park. Seeing that empty dam was always kind of spooky.

My Mom had a WW2 Navy Wave friend who lived on Cloverdale with her family. They lost everything in the flood, so mom took all our 'old' clothes to give to her friend's kids who were about the same ages of my sis and me. Mom said that since her friend's house was destroyed, they soon after moved out of state to stay with relatives. So mom never saw her again, only kept in touch for a while via post.

So the rule of thumb for dams is: clear water=all clear; brown water=brown pants

LA is generally a terrifying exercise in hubris. Just because you think you can build a city on arid land doesn’t mean you should.

Hey That dam has a crack in it Edit: So off of the list of reasons the dam failed, I didn't hear a single one that couldn't have been resolved with regular maintenance. I don't know why so many people seem to think once a thing is built, that's it. Buildings, dams, cars.... Just about anything human-made needs regular maintenance to work properly. P.S. Plainly Difficult, if you see this, the Edmund Fitzgerald? Please?

Could you do a spot about that fellow in the lawn chair with helium balloons tied to it? He dropped his air rifle and had no way to pop the balloons to descend. He was tracked on radar and I believe he was spotted by a pilot.....thanks.

We measure water is cubic feet. Acre feet is hella confusing.

Errrr.... I don't drink water because fish do sexytime in it. Instead, I stick to beer and vodka....

Just for once, everyone present on the day did their job and did it well. This could have been so much worse.

Living below a damn is not my idea of a safe place to live ? Just like living in floodplains knowingly makes no sense to me ? I cannot imagine the horrors of hearing the sounds of an unprecedented scope as this rubble filled man made tsunami roared down upon them ?

Awww dam, a PD video! Sorry couldn't resist.. 😏

Does anyone know what those two tubes coming out of the reservoir tower do? On the map they are labelled as North and South circulators.

Sample and gauge taps plaqued up with scale, causing the readings to go awry. That happened to steam locomotives, too. The locomotives blew up. End of story.

Speaking of disasters, a water tower just collapsed right next to a house, in a town in the metropolitan area of my city, two days ago. The wave demolished the house. There was one teenage boy inside of it. He is in the hospital, as far as I know.

I have two fault lines on my property that intersect.. I hate my neighbors, so I'm going to build a pool on that spot!

this is a good comparison to that dam that wasn't maintained at all. Both are fail, but it really show how a good maintenance crew can save People's Lives

Thank you for covering this! I was very young at the time. There were some vivid images about it, thank to the TV coverage. But I still have trouble comprehending what happened, such as where the water went, in relation to where we lived. We were far enough away to not be in danger, but I'm sure my parents knew people who could have been affected.

Mmmmmmmm! Asphalt lined drinking water reservoir. No wonder Cali came up with Prop 65 warnings.

Project Motto, ‘Worry about that later’. It’s like getting into a car you know has no brakes and worrying about stopping when you need to.

Do the sunshine skyway bridge. I can help you with some knowledge.

of all the damn breaks I've seen here, this is one there they didn't cheap out on tight material, didn't dismiss geologists, didn't ignore construction faults, had proper monitoring and responded in time when it started to show signs of failure.

Bottom line is piss poor engineering resulted in this damn failure. Surprise, same engineer also worked on another dam failure.

A goofy dam construction all around. Three sides of a square lake are made up of a dam? Goofy.

Is L.A really plagued with drought, considering it was built more or less in a desert? 👀

interesting topic but I thought I was going to see the copter footage not some fuzzy concoction a few seconds long.

I wonder why they didn't make another wall on the side that was towards a town, yknow, since that one wasnt up against the side of a mountain or large hill.

FINALLY! A safety measure in place that worked, as in, humans paid attention. How many disaster documentaries have you watched, read or heard where, “Well, this was is place and it was bypassed/ disabled/ or (best yet) ignored”?

That's what my dad used to call me.... "a DAM failure"

I hope to god we never see a video on the Hoover damn failure. That will not be a good video due to all the deaths.

Chief engineer: Yep, damn good dam. Dam: Hold my beer