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K Street, Sacramento, 1862. By Unknown (published by A. Rosenfield (San Francisco). Image: Wikimedia Commons

K Street, Sacramento, 1862. By Unknown (published by A. Rosenfield (San Francisco). Image: Wikimedia Commons


The Inertia

Winter is hitting California much harder than normal this year. Floods and mudflows and road closures and rivers overflowing and street surfing and general devastation. Of course, climate change deniers are pounding their tables, spit flying from their mouths as they cackle wildly, gleefully screaming “Rain from the sky, libtards! We TOLD you so!” Scientists, meanwhile, are sighing and shaking their heads. “This is just more proof, you morons,” they say. “It’s just a pendulum swinging farther and farther each way, but you’re too deaf to listen, and we’re getting sick proving it.”

While I’m on the side of science (that climate change is natural but we’re accelerating it), every 100 to 200 years, California is slammed by floods of truly biblical proportions. And they’re usually caused by something that’s happening in California right now: a certain type of storm called an atmospheric river, “narrow bands of water vapor about a mile above the ocean that extend for thousands of kilometers.”

According to an article in Scientific American, storms caused by these atmospheric rivers are mainly responsible for many of the most damaging floods to ever hit the west coast of the United States. The most recent occurred long enough ago have been pretty much forgotten, but recently enough to coincide nearly perfectly with that 100 to 200 year assessment. Back in the winter of 1861-62, California was struck by a flood so big it counts as a Megaflood, which sounds like either a movie starring The Rock or something out of the bible, a book that is nearly as believable as a movie starring The Rock.

“This disaster turned enormous regions of the state into inland seas for months, and took thousands of human lives,” wrote B. Lynn Ingram, a professor in the Earth and Planetary Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. “The costs were devastating: one quarter of California’s economy was destroyed, forcing the state into bankruptcy.”

Now, of course, most of the regions that were underwater for that horribly shitty winter have become some of California’s biggest cities. Everyone wants to live on the ocean, and sometimes, the ocean wants to grow legs and come ashore–bad news for those in the way. Interestingly enough, the flood of 1861 came after nearly 20 years of crippling drought. Then, in December, the rains started, and they didn’t let up until more than four years’ worth of rain had fallen from Canada all the way to Mexico. Nearly 70 inches of rain fell that winter, ruining crops, flooding vast tracts of land, and even creating a massive, muddy lake four miles from the banks of the Santa Ana River that didn’t go away for an entire month.

For those that’ve been following the snow scene, weird amounts of snow are puking all over California and Canada. Well, that happened back then, too. Just before the rains well and truly started, the Sierra Nevadas got somewhere around 12 feet of snow. Then, the warm, wet storms–the atmospheric river storms–sloshed their way in, pregnant with moisture. The rivers in the Sierra Nevadas couldn’t take it, jumped their banks, and flooded the shit out of everywhere down stream.

The Central Valley of California, a low lying area surrounded by hills and mountains, turned into a flood that, according to Scientific American, was 300 miles long, 20 miles wide, with a staggering maximum depth of 30 feet. It was catastrophic, and everything ground to a halt.

Although most of California suffered, nowhere was hit harder than the infant capital, Sacramento. It was the state’s newest golden city–the place where it was all going to happen. By January, the entire city was 10 feet deep in putrid, muddy, cold water. Thousands died, and the city was brought to its knees.

Old Town Sacramento, which is now a bustling, happy little tourist attraction amid the new Sacramento, is filled with cobblestone streets, waffle cones, and a lifetime of sugar. It was a main part of Sacramento back in then, and it became part of a decade-long project to raise the downtown area up to 15 feet. For those who’ve visited Old Town, it’s obvious where the original city’s foundation used to be.

It wasn’t just California, either–weather, of course, isn’t restricted by state lines–it was Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and much of Canada’s British Columbia. Even Nevada, that arid, dusty state where gamblers wash away their parched sorrows with slot machines and booze, twice the annual amount of rain fell in two months. The dry earth couldn’t take it, and everything overflowed.

So how does this all tie into today’s strange weather patterns? Well, it should be obvious. While we’re much more prepared for megafloods–dams, dikes, and accurate weather reporting all improve our chances of weathering the storm–throughout history, atmospheric rivers are responsible for catastrophic floods around the world. Right now, as you’re reading this, the same storms that caused those disasterous floods more than a century ago are ripping across the West Coast. And although climate change deniers, so staunch in their vitriolic belief that Trump is right and science is wrong, may use the regular occurence of storms like these as proof that the earth’s climate is changing no matter what, it’s useful to remember that researchers aren’t denying that. Instead they’re saying that we’re helping to turn up the heat. That, or course, super charges those regularly occurring super storms, and no amount of denying will change nature’s course.

Editor’s Note: There are a million more stories from the flood, and the piece in Scientific American covers many more of them. They’ve published a variety of personal accounts from journal entries and exerpts from news reports, as well. Read them all HERE.

 
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