![]() ![]() Nearly every house and farm over this immense region is gone. Steamers ran back over the ranches fourteen miles from the river, carrying stock, etc, to the hills. The entire valley was a lake extending from the mountains on one side to the coast range hills on the other. All the roads in the middle of the state are impassable. ![]() In a letter dated January 31, 1862, William Brewer wrote to his brother on the East Coast: Thousands of farms are entirely under water cattle starving and drowning. The water submerged farmlands, drowned people and livestock, and washed away homes and whole towns. In less populated Anaheim, an inland sea was created by a flooded Santa Ana River that spread up to four miles wide in parts, was four feet deep, and lasted about a month before dissipating.Īnother inland sea that was as deep as 30 feet in some places was created in the Central Valley according to Scientific American, submerging newly installed telegraph polls that connected San Francisco to New York, temporarily disrupting all transcontinental communication. At the time, one home in every eight was destroyed statewide.īridges were washed away in Gold Country in the Sierra foothills, and drowning deaths were recorded daily along the Yuba and Feather rivers, with "an entire settlement of Chinese miners" drowned along the Yuba River according to Scientific American in a 2013 piece about the floods.Īnd unlike the recent spate of rains, these atmospheric rivers hit the entire coast with equal vengeance over the course of 43 days. ![]() Most of the state's 500,000 inhabitants at that time lived in Northern California, which is where we have most of the records of the floods though one can imagine that the economic and human impact of such a flood would be exponentially greater today. The rain started in Washington and Oregon earlier, in November, with warm temperatures triggering quick melting of snowpack in early December leading to Oregon City, south of Portland on the Willamette River, flooding beyond recognition, and several nearby towns Linn City, Orleans, and Champoeg, the site of the first provisional government in the state being completely destroyed and never rebuilt.įor California, much like we've seen in recent weeks, it was not so much constant rainfall as high accumulation from several brief, distinct periods of heavy rain and this was not, in fact, an El Nino season either followed by the fast melting of accumulated snow. The storms of December 1861 and January 1862 caused widespread flooding and damage from Canada down to Sonora, Mexico, and this was capped off with early snowmelt triggered by warmer temperatures in the Sierra and elsewhere. And much like those that have been hitting California this winter, the cause of the Great Flood was a relentless series of atmospheric rivers that dumped 24.63 inches of rain in San Francisco in the month of January and 66 inches in Los Angeles that year (four times the average), and flooded Sacramento so severely that it was widely called " Lake Sacramento" leading to a raising of the entire city eight to ten feet so that it could remain the state capital. Though Northern California saw some intense rain over the last couple of weeks, bringing rainfall totals for the month of January well above average for many cities and towns, these numbers are still nowhere near the torrents of rain that fell on the West Coast between December 1861 and January 1862, creating what was called The Great Flood of 1862. ![]()
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