Hi, this is Pastor Jared Pazarski from Holdfast Baptist Church in Fresno, California, and
I'm standing at the site of the St. Francis Dam.
The St. Francis Dam was built in 1924 to 1926, and you can see behind me where it
went into the canyon wall, just directly behind me, and you say, well, where is
the St. Francis Dam?
This is the former site of the St. Francis Dam.
The St. Francis Dam is not here anymore because the St. Francis Dam actually failed, and
it was a complete collapse of the dam in this canyon.
What I wanted to talk to you about today was just how this applies to some things
in the Bible.
What happened was, when the St. Francis Dam was being built between 1924 and 1926,
self-made engineer William Mulholland, who was the chief on the project, decided to
add to the height of the dam, not just once, but twice he added to the height of the
dam, and due to the fact that investors and people that were financing the project
didn't want to pay for re-engineering the entire structure, which would have, you
know, adding to the height of the dam, more weight, more water to serve more people
downstream, obviously puts a lot more structural stress on the dam itself, but they decided
it would be too expensive to re-engineer the entire structure, so they just added to the
top of the dam without doing that to save money.
You know, this reminds me of 1 Timothy chapter 6 and verse number 10 where the Bible
says, you know, for the love of money is the root of all evil.
1 Timothy chapter 6 talks about, you know, loving money will drive you into things
like sorrows, it will be a snare unto you, and that's actually what happened here
is that because of this engineering failure and because that they tried to save money
and not do the due diligence that they should have done to re-engineer and re-fortify
the dam, on March 12, 1928, this dam collapsed.
It collapsed sending a 200-foot wall of water downstream, which killed over 450 people.
That is, you know, that is sorrow is what happened.
And this just shows us that in our lives, you know, we can apply this engineering failure
to our lives because any time that we use money as our driving factor to make decisions,
the Bible is telling us that we will be wrong, and that's a perfect example of what
happened here.
You know, God says in Matthew 6, 24, you cannot serve God and mammon.
You know, the Bible says, you know, that we should, you know, pay attention to our
finances.
We should work hard.
We should not go into debt.
But whenever we put that first in our lives, whenever we put money first in our lives
and we have that drive for money, you know, tell us where we should live or where
we should work, the Bible is telling us in 1 Timothy 6, Matthew 6, that those decisions will
be wrong.
That decision here, as we can see, you know, just, you know, rubble behind us and this
terrible catastrophe that took hundreds of lives, we can see the Bible proved true
by that.
This decision to not re-engineer this dam and to not build this structure turned
into what is known as the greatest civil engineering failure of the 20th century.
And hundreds of people lost their lives.
Just another example of how the Bible is always true and we should always follow the
Bible and the advice it gives us in our lives.
Thank you for watching.
Have a great day and God bless.
you