Hansen Dam
California
Hansen Dam sits at the mouth of Big Tujunga Wash in the northeastern San Fernando Valley. After catastrophic floods in nineteen thirty-eight killed well over a hundred people and caused tens of millions of dollars in damage across Los Angeles, the Army Corps of Engineers moved fast. Work began that same year.
The dam was completed in nineteen forty, an earthen-fill structure stretching two thousand six hundred feet and rising nearly one hundred feet above the valley floor. It was named for Homer Hansen, a local rancher whose family had worked this land before the dam was built. The reservoir it created can hold nearly ninety thousand acre-feet of water.
Today the surrounding recreation area covers over one thousand acres and draws swimmers, cyclists, and equestrians, but the dam's job remains the same: holding back the mountains when they decide to let loose.
