Home›Places›Rapid City, SD›Canyon Lake Dam & the 1972 Rapid City Flood
Historic place

Canyon Lake Dam & the 1972 Rapid City Flood

Canyon Lake Park, Canyon Lake Drive, Rapid City, SD

On the night of June 9, 1972, a debris-clogged dam above downtown Rapid City gave way and sent a wall of water through the city, killing 238 people in six hours.

📅 1972–present🏛️ Historic SiteRepurposedBuilt 1972
Open on the mapSlide back to 1972
Canyon Lake Dam & the 1972 Rapid City Flood, Canyon Lake Park, Canyon Lake Drive, Rapid City, SD
1972 Rapid City flood damage · NOAA, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The story

Thunderstorms stalled over the Black Hills and dropped up to 15 inches of rain in hours. Debris clogged Canyon Lake Dam's spillway until it breached around 10:45 p.m.; a crest of roughly 50,000 cubic feet per second tore through downtown by 12:15 a.m. on June 10. The flood killed 238 people, destroyed some 1,335 homes, and wrecked 15 of Rapid Creek's 23 bridges. Afterward the city permanently barred rebuilding across ~750 acres of floodplain, creating the greenway of parks and bike paths that runs through Rapid City today; Memorial Park downtown holds a monument naming the 238 victims.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

The current dam is the third on the site (1890s resort dam, 1930s WPA rebuild, post-1972 reconstruction).
15 of Rapid Creek's 23 bridges were destroyed and ~5,000 vehicles wrecked.
About 750 acres of floodplain were permanently rezoned to parks after 1972 — the greenway still used today.

Connected places

Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF)

Lead, SD
Black Hills

Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway

Spearfish, SD
Black Hills

Roughlock Falls

Savoy, SD
Black Hills

Galena (silver camp)

Deadwood, SD
Black Hills

Nemo (Homestake timber camp)

Nemo, SD
Black Hills

Explore the full web of connections on the map.

Nearby history

Chapel in the Hills

3788 Chapel Lane · 1.4 km away
An exact hand-carved replica of Norway's 850-year-old Borgund stave church, built in the Black Hills in 1969 as the on-s

Rapid City Indian School (now Oyate Health Center)

3200 Canyon Lake Drive · 2.2 km away
A campus built in 1898 to strip Lakota, Cheyenne, and Crow children of their language and culture spent the mid-20th cen

Storybook Island

1301 Sheridan Lake Road · 2.7 km away
A free storybook-themed children's park built entirely on donated labor in 1959 has closed only once in its history — wh

Dinosaur Park

940 Skyline Dr · 4.2 km away

West Boulevard Historic District

803 West Boulevard · 4.8 km away
Rapid City's gold-boom elite platted a 190-foot-wide boulevard with a landscaped median in 1885, and more than 600 of th

Art Alley

Alley between 6th & 7th St (Main to St Joseph) · 5.5 km away
What began as unsanctioned canvases hung on downtown brick walls in the early 2000s grew into a permit-managed, constant

Know something about Canyon Lake Dam & the 1972 Rapid City Flood? An old photo, a date, a memory of what stood here before?

Add it on the map
Sourceshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Black_Hills_flood