St. Francis Dam victims Mazie (left) and Marjorie Curtis with younger brother Danny.

Marjorie Anna "Margie" Curtis: b. April 4, 1922, d. March 13, 1928

Mazie Kathleen Curtis: b. October 3, 1923, d. 1928

Daniel Oden Curtis: b. October 30, 1924, d. January 20, 1995

Children of Lyman W Curtis (1890-1928) and Lillian Luzelta Dorsettt Eilers (1899-1993); all intered at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale.

Lyman Walter Curtis and Lillian Luzelta Dorsett were married Aug. 16, 1921, in Bakersfield. Lyman was a construction worker who helped build the roads at the St. Francis Dam site in the 1920s. In 1928, Lyman and Lillian lived with their three children — daughters Marjorie and Mazie and their 3-year-old younger brother, Danny — in the encampment immediately below the dam. When the dam ruptured just before midnight on March 12, 1928, Lyman and the girls were among the first casualties. Lillian and Danny survived.

Seven miles up San Francisquito Canyon Road from today's Copper Hill Drive, construction on the 700-foot-long, 205-foot-high St. Francis Dam started in August 1924. With a 12.5 billion-gallon capacity, the reservoir began to fill with water on March 1, 1926. It was completed two months later.

At 11:57:30 p.m. on March 12, 1928, the dam failed, sending a 180-foot-high wall of water crashing down San Francisquito Canyon. An estimated 431 people lay dead by the time the floodwaters reached the Pacific Ocean south of Ventura 5½ hours later.

It was the second-worst disaster in California history, after the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, in terms of lives lost — and America's worst civil engineering failure of the 20th Century.