Rosenfield, Wikimedia Commons)Īnd despite the recent wet weeks, Northern California is nowhere near the final yearly rainfall total of 1861-62. A lithograph shows people in boats on K Street in downtown Sacramento during the Great Flood of 1862. There also are thousands of miles of levees and pumps, weirs and other flood control projects that were not in place in the 1860s. Now, California has large dams and reservoirs that limit flooding in wet years. An estimated 4,000 people died, roughly 1% of California’s population at the time, and more than the death toll in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Warm storms on a massive snowpack that winter caused immense flooding, wiping farms, mills, bridges and in some case whole towns off the map. Leland Stanford, who had been elected governor, took a rowboat through the streets of Sacramento to reach his inauguration. It’s really good news because it takes off the trajectory toward worsening flooding.”įor a sense of how much worse it has been, consider the winter of 1861-62.īetween November 1861 and January 1862, it rained so much that the Central Valley became a vast inland sea, 30 feet deep, for 300 miles. “It’s going to help us dry out and dig out heading into late January. “We’ve gotten so much water and so much snow,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. In other words, if it didn’t rain another drop until October, they would still have a normal precipitation year. So much rain fell since Christmas in Northern California that some cities, including Oakland, Stockton, Modesto and Livermore, already have reached their yearly average rainfall totals. It was hard along the way to separate the individual storms.” “We had a strong jet stream that was bringing in storms, one after another. They became a blur,” said Jan Null, a meteorologist with Golden Gate Weather Services in Half Moon Bay, who compiled the totals.
“The rainfall numbers over the past three weeks just kept adding up. 25, 1862, during a landmark winter that became known as “The Great Flood of 1862.” The only three-week period that was wetter in San Francisco - often used as the benchmark for Bay Area weather because it has the oldest records - came during the Civil War when a drowning 23.01 inches fell from Jan. And it’s more than five times the city’s historical average of 3.1 inches over the same time. That’s the second-wettest three-week period at any time in San Francisco’s recorded history since daily records began in 1849 during the Gold Rush. 15, 17 inches of rain fell in downtown San Francisco. The last time it happened, Abraham Lincoln was president.įrom Dec. New rainfall totals show that no person alive has experienced a three-week period in the Bay Area as wet as these past 21 days. How wet has it been recently in Northern California?
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