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Geologic evidence shows that truly massive floods, caused by rainfall alone, have occurred in California every 100 to 200 years. Such floods are likely caused by atmospheric rivers: narrow bands of water vapor about a mile above the ocean that extend for thousands of kilometers.
The atmospheric river storms featured in a January 2013 article in Scientific American that I co-wrote with Michael Dettinger, The Coming Megafloods, are responsible for most of the largest historical floods in many western states. The only megaflood to strike the American West in recent history occurred during the winter of 1861-62. California bore the brunt of the damage. This disaster turned enormous regions of the state into inland seas for months, and took thousands of human lives. The costs were devastating: one quarter of California’s economy was destroyed, forcing the state into bankruptcy.
Today, the same regions that were submerged in 1861-62 are home to California’s fastest-growing cities. Although this flood is all but forgotten, important lessons from this catastrophe can be learned. Much of the insight can be gleaned from harrowing accounts in diary entries, letters and newspaper articles, as well as the book Up and Down California in 1860-1864, written by William Brewer, who surveyed the new state’s natural resources with state geologist Josiah Whitney.
In 1861, farmers and ranchers were praying for rain after two exceptionally dry decades. In December their prayers were answered with a vengeance, as a series of monstrous Pacific storms slammed—one after another—into the West coast of North America, from Mexico to Canada. The storms produced the most violent flooding residents had ever seen, before or since.
Sixty-six inches of rain fell in Los Angeles that year, more than four times the normal annual amount, causing rivers to surge over their banks, spreading muddy water for miles across the arid landscape. Large brown lakes formed on the normally dry plains between Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean, even covering vast areas of the Mojave Desert. In and around Anaheim, , flooding of the Santa Ana River created an inland sea four feet deep, stretching up to four miles from the river and lasting four weeks.
Residents in northern California, where most of the state’s 500,000 people lived, were contending with devastation and suffering of their own. In early December, the Sierra Nevada experienced a series of cold arctic storms that dumped 10 to 15 feet of snow, and these were soon followed by warm atmospheric rivers storms. The series of warm storms swelled the rivers in the Sierra Nevada range so that they became raging torrents, sweeping away entire communities and mining settlements in the foothills—California’s famous “Gold Country.” A January 15, 1862, report from the Nelson Point Correspondence described the scene: “On Friday last, we were visited by the most destructive and devastating flood that has ever been the lot of ‘white’ men to see in this part of the country. Feather River reached the height of 9 feet more than was ever known by the ‘oldest inhabitant,’ carrying away bridges, camps, stores, saloon, restaurant, and much real-estate.” Drowning deaths occurred every day on the Feather, Yuba and American rivers. In one tragic account, an entire settlement of Chinese miners was drowned by floods on the Yuba River.
This enormous pulse of water from the rain flowed down the slopes and across the landscape, overwhelming streams and rivers, creating a huge inland sea in California’s enormous Central Valley—a region at least 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. Water covered farmlands and towns, drowning people, horses and cattle, and washing away houses, buildings, barns, fences and bridges. The water reached depths up to 30 feet, completely submerging telegraph poles that had just been installed between San Francisco and New York, causing transportation and communications to completely break down over much of the state for a month. William Brewer wrote a series of letters to his brother on the east coast describing the surreal scenes of tragedy that he witnessed during his travels in the region that winter and spring. In a description dated January 31, 1862, Brewer wrote:
Thousands of farms are entirely under water—cattle starving and drowning. All the roads in the middle of the state are impassable; so all mails are cut off. The telegraph also does not work clear through. In the Sacramento Valley for some distance the tops of the poles are under water. The entire valley was a lake extending from the mountains on one side to the coast range hills on the other. Steamers ran back over the ranches fourteen miles from the river, carrying stock, etc, to the hills. Nearly every house and farm over this immense region is gone. America has never before seen such desolation by flood as this has been, and seldom has the Old World seen the like.
Brewer describes a great sheet of brown rippling water extending from the Coast Range to the Sierra Nevada. One-quarter of the state’s estimated 800,000 cattle drowned in the flood, marking the beginning of the end of the cattle-based ranchero society in California. One-third of the state’s property was destroyed, and one home in eight was destroyed completely or carried away by the floodwaters.
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27 Comments
Add Comment101 years later, a similar scenario took place in the winter of 1962. Four spent typhoons hit northern California one right after another. The worst was in the northern Coast Ranges where there was a thousand-year flood. I was living in the Bay Area, and in three weeks we had an hour of sunshine. There was a picture in the paper of hurricane flags flying in San Francisco because the storms may have lost their spin but they still packed winds of hurricane force.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was living in the Bay Area during the Fall of 1962. There was only one typhoon remnant that reached the West Coast. The worst floods along the north coast of CA happened during the TEREC (Truly Extraordinary Rainfall Event in California) of January, 1964. The Eel River went from around 1500 cfs to over 700,000 cfs during that event. That's 1 1/2 times the average flow of the Mississippi River at its mouth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am a native Californian. My father told of hurricanes from Baja that wiped out structures along the Southern Californian coast when he was a boy in the early 20th century. I have witnessed many storms, floods, and landslides but nothing that approaches what this article is talking about.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery interesting article. Some parts of Australia are currently experiencing "unprecedented" heat waves and record temperatures.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSuch terms,particularly "unprecedented", can be very misleading and people can react in an emotional way and search for a culprit, which is usually "anthropogenic climate change".
Even that terrible tsunami disaster in Japan recently was not unprecedented. There are stone markers along the East coast of Japan, going back hundreds of years, which were erected to advise future generations of the possibility that floods once again might rise to such levels.
On such markers, there were sometimes written warnings, "Do not build your home below this level."
"Solar energy nutballs?" I don't understand. You write as if solar energy proponents are suggesting it is the be-all-and-end-all to our future energy needs, rather than just one component of an overall strategy of renewable energy sources and energy storage systems. By definition... oil and gas out of the ground are finite, as is the mass of the Earth. At some point, if we are going to still have iPhones and jet airplanes, we must find renewable and sustainable energy sources. Solar is just one part of that solution... along with liquid fuel from plant sources, hydropower, wind power, and others.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisvincentrj
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Such terms,particularly "unprecedented", can be very misleading and people can react in an emotional way and search for a culprit, which is usually "anthropogenic climate change".
As a geologist, I say 'so true'. P{eople have little perspectve as to what the Earth can throw at us. The Tsunami in Japan and the one that hit Indonesia were pop guns next to what could happen as I type this. There really hasn't been a 'major' geologic event in the last millenium...just a bunch of burps... and we humans have become smug in our use of 'unprecedented'. The geologic record is crammed full of events that could change society as we know it.
Man-made global warming will surely be blamed. "Oh, oh, where we goin' go, when the volcanoe blows?" I saw a special once about a place prone to debris flows (rivers of dense mud). One guy was building away right it the path saying he didn't care about what might happen.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor a bit More on California's other storm of the century, see: http://8020vision.com/2010/12/22/californias-other-storm-of-the-century/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI include a chart showing the trend in storm related disasters. Also some commentary on the effect this will have on property insurance. My home owners insurance has steadily increased over the past 8 years, beyond the rate of inflation, and I recently called the insurance provider (USAA) and they said that unexpected storm related losses around the country have lead them to raise rates. Insurance companies are doing their own research on climate change and how it will impact extreme weather.
@ jaykimball,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are only half right there, I think the truth is more like: Insurance companies are doing their own research as to how they can use climate change as an excuse to up their rates.
I appreciate your attempt to put numbers on the problem, but your charts are useless. There is no way to adjust your numbers to differentiate for under reporting of the past.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the past there were no satellites giving universal storm data. Only a fraction of the storms were reported and data logged. Now not only are they reported, but human development has increased the infrastructure that severe weather can affect. Unless some adjustment can be calculated (hard to quantify the negative) your chart is misleading, and cannot be used for the purpose stated.
Just because detection and reporting has increased dramatically, does NOT mean there has been an actual increase in N. This is all that your chart indicates. GK
The lesson to be learned is that societies need to make a priority of constructing and maintaining robust infrastructure. If you study how people are harmed from adverse weather you will find that the root cause is overwhelming due to this issue.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd how do nuclear plants handle low river levels caused by drought? What's that? They have to throttle down their output? Oh, and if power to the plant gets knocked out for more than a day or two, they have shown to fail nearly 100% of the time through catastrophic hydrogen explosions, scattering radioactive debris over thousands of square kms. If you want to cherry-pick, you've backed the wrong horse, seth!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNobody is reacting emotionally to the FACT that our CO2 emissions are changing the climate. On top of the IPCC, we now have former climate skeptic, Dr. Richard Muller, stating unequivocally that humans are changing the climate:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.scitechnol.com/GIGS/GIGS-1-101.pdf
We've increased CO2 concentrations by 40% already and are showing no signs of slowing down. BASIC PHYSICS tells us that higher CO2 concentrations warm the Earth's climate and by how much. That level of warming is troubling and it is abundantly clear that emissions need to start dropping soon.
Sault--
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWould reducing CO2 emissions do ANYTHING to reduce the risk of severe weather in California?
We also have a new PEER REVIEWED report that claims that carbon soot causes two thirds as much warming as CO. Forgotten that already? I posted about it last week. at first you abused me for posting rubbish if I remember correctly, until you found the report yourself. where have you incorporated this new data into your ad nauseam & inaccurate claims about CO2.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCongratulations on a straight, factual article. Much better than the earlier: The Coming Megafloods, which tried to tie the report into AGW alarmism. Facts are much more powerfull.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPosts #5 & #12. Where is the post they refer to?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"17. Carlyle 10:57 PM 1/20/13
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPosts #5 & #12. Where is the post they refer to?"
Judging by the replies, the original post may have been removed, likely for good reason.
Without reading the post, which isn't here, who can say for sure how offensive it may have been or why it was removed, if it was.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Solar energy nutballs?" Would those be people who believe that the sun provides energy, the same fools that think the sun actually powers things like weather, plant growth, the production of fossilized hydrocarbons, the fools that agree with the trillions of photosynthetic organisms that mistakenly orient themselves to catch the imaginary energy from the sun?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo the ones that think solar energy can meet our electricity needs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"You write as if solar energy proponents are suggesting it is the be-all-and-end-all to our future energy needs, rather than just one component of an overall strategy of renewable energy sources and energy storage systems."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat's probably because he is employing a straw man argument that depends on the nirvana fallacy, the idea that something is not useful unless it is perfect and solves all problems.
Gee you'd think somebody with a claimed Master's degree in Engineering could answer those questions himself.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"And how do nuclear plants handle low river levels caused by drought? What's that? They have to throttle down their output? Oh, "
Since modern nuke plants don't actually use water they just heat it up in cooling towers, over the long term, they have to spend tiny fraction of a cent per kwh increasing the capacity of those towers.
"and if power to the plant gets knocked out for more than a day or two, they have shown to fail nearly 100% of the time through catastrophic hydrogen explosions,
scattering radioactive debris over thousands of square kms. "
Actually, while you haven't heard of diesels maybe your Mom has - ask her!!. Been powering towns and villages in remoter areas of the word 24/7 without interruption for the best part of a century.
The only failure in history of that type was at FUKU in the corrupt culture of Japan which put the diesels underwater. That won't be happening again.
"If you want to cherry-pick, you've backed the wrong horse, seth!"
You are so thick, I doubt you know what a horse or cherry are. Can you get your Mom to look at your posts before they go online?
Actually only wind and solar with fossil backup are the "renewable" energy scams being installed these days. There are no other renewable technologies included storage that have the slightest hope of implementation in the next 50 years based on what research is giving us these days.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith wind/solar backed up by inefficient gas plant run inefficiently we'd put out less GHG's, less air pollution and burn less gas and money by replacing the entire scam with efficient gas plant or nuclear power.
ASTONISHING!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFascinating story. Don't remember any of it in my studies (albeit in Canada).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExcellent article. I'd like to know more about the extent of flooding in the Mojave Desert during the megafloods that occur on a rougly 200 year cycle.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrom the comments of the antiscience trolls who visit this website, you'd think that all this article said was, "DANGER, MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING."
Instead, the authors calmly discuss the need for a "deep understanding of the natural patterns and frequencies of these events."
It's good that somebody gives a damn about climate research.