The St. Francis Dam: Engineering LicensureHow one man's fatal error created dam safety laws.

From the show

Rules Written in Blood

The catastrophic collapse of the St. Francis Dam revealed the deadly blind spots of even the most trusted experts. This 1928 disaster, caused by a single engineer's unchecked authority, killed over 430 people and exposed a fatal flaw in the system. The tragedy led California to establish the nation's first dam safety program and professional licensing for civil engineers, ensuring that no single individual would ever again have unsupervised control over such critical public works.