Sacramento, 100 miles up the Sacramento River from San Francisco, was (and still is) precariously located at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers. In 1861, the city was in many ways a hub: the young state’s sparkling new capital, an important commercial and agricultural center, and the terminus for stagecoaches, wagon trains, the pony express and riverboats from San Francisco. Although floods in Sacramento were not unknown to the residents, nothing could have prepared them for the series of deluges and massive flooding that engulfed the city that winter. The levees built to protect Sacramento from catastrophic floods crumbled under the force of the rising waters of the American River. In early January the floodwaters submerged the entire city under 10 feet of brown, debris-laden water. The water was so deep and dirty that no one dared to move about the city except by boat. The floodwaters caused immense destruction of property and loss of life.
California’s new Governor, Leland Stanford, was to be inaugurated on January 10, but the floodwaters swept through Sacramento that day, submerging the city. Citizens fled by any means possible, yet the inauguration ceremony took place at the capital building anyway, despite the mounting catastrophe. Governor Stanford was forced to travel from his mansion to the capital building by rowboat. Following the expedited ceremony, with floodwaters rising at a rate of one foot per hour, Stanford rowed back to his mansion, where he was forced to steer his boat to a second story window in order to enter his home. Conditions did not improve in the following weeks. California’s legislature, unable to function in the submerged city, finally gave up and moved to San Francisco on January 22, to wait out the floods.
Sacramento remained underwater for months. Brewer visited the city on March 9, three months after the flooding began, and described the scene:
Such a desolate scene I hope to never see again. Most of the city is still under water, and has been there for three months. A part is out of the water, that is, the streets are above water, but every low place is full—cellars and yards are full, houses and walls wet, everything uncomfortable. No description that I can write will give you any adequate conception of the discomfort and wretchedness this must give rise to. I took a boat and two boys, and we rowed about for an hour or two. Houses, stores, stables, everything, were surrounded by water. Yards were ponds enclosed by dilapidated, muddy, slimy fences; household furniture, chairs, tables, sofas, the fragments of houses, were floating in the muddy waters or lodged in nooks and corners. I saw three sofas floating in different yards. The basements of the better class of houses were half full of water, and through the windows, one could see chairs, tables, bedsteads, etc., afloat. Through the windows of a schoolhouse I saw the benches and desks afloat. Over most of the city boats are still the only way of getting around.
The new Capital is far out in the water—the Governor’s house stands as in a lake—churches, public buildings, private buildings, everything, are wet or in the water. Not a road leading from the city is passable, business is at a dead standstill, everything looks forlorn and wretched. Many houses have partially toppled over; some have been carried from their foundations, several streets (now avenues of water) are blocked up with houses that have floated in them, dead animals lie about here and there—a dreadful picture. I don’t think the city will ever rise from the shock, I don’t see how it can.
The death and destruction of this flood caused such trauma that the city of Sacramento embarked on a long-term project of raising the downtown district by 10 to 15 feet in the seven years after the flood. Governor Stanford also raised his mansion from two to three stories, leaving empty the ground floor, to avoid damage from any future flooding events.
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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.