But after hearing about the 1862 flood, the ARkStorm team dug into research from Ingram and others for information about megastorms before US statehood and European contact. What they found stunned them—and should stun anyone who relies on California to produce food (not to mention anyone who lives there). Swings on that magnitude normally occur a handful of times each century, but in the model by Swain’s team, “it goes from something that happens maybe once in a generation to something that happens two or three times,” he told me in an interview. In a pioneering 1998 paper, researchers Yong Zhu and Reginald E. Newell found that nearly all the vapor transport between the subtropics (regions just south or north of the equator, depending on the hemisphere) toward the poles occurred in just five or six narrow bands. "We're sort of in the thick of it right now; we're ready to press go on some of these simulations and get cranking," he said. Excerpt from the video: "California, 1862. His letters home, chronicling his four-year journey up and down California, form one of the most vivid contemporary accounts of its early statehood. The February 2017 Oroville Dam scare -- when 180,000 people were evacuated due to fears it would collapse -- was a wakeup call for emergency planning. The agency likens an ARkstorm to the devastating floods that swept through California's central valley in the winter of 1861-2. Jones and Swain warned that a storm like this is not a freak event -- it is inevitable. All Rights Reserved. Eight hours after the evacuation, highways were still jammed with slow-moving traffic. Listen on Apple Podcasts. During its time as a US food-production powerhouse, California has been known for its periodic droughts and storms. The levees protecting those homes are designed for a 75-year flood event, not a "mega storm.". Personal/Senior exemption amounts. It all amounts to a food-production juggernaut: California generates $46 billion worth of food per year, nearly double the haul of its closest competitor among US states, the corn-and-soybean behemoth Iowa. One was that they had robust data on the two twentieth-century storm events, giving disaster modelers plenty to work with. Just as work was being completed in fall 2018, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission assessed the situation and found that a “probable maximum flood”—on the scale of the ArkStorm—would likely overwhelm the dam. "It's very difficult to prepare in many ways, and we have, you can argue, that we've made it worse, because we put in our flood control, and then we built underneath the flood control. Swain said recent evidence suggests a "mega storm" happens about once every 200 years, meaning in theory the next "big one" could happen at any point in the next 40 years. Tree rings and rocks show six "mega storms" more severe than the 1861-1862 storm in the last 1,800 years. With California’s 2020 rainy season now underway, imagine almost a month of drenching storms along the entire West Coast. So the state—and a substantial portion of our food system—exists on a razor’s edge between droughts and floods, its annual water resources decided by massive, increasingly fickle transfers of moisture from the South Pacific. With California's 2020 rainy season now underway, imagine almost a month of drenching storms along the entire West Coast. Eventually, in March, Brewer made it to Sacramento, hoping (without success) to lay hands on the state funds he needed to continue his survey. And this time, given California’s emergence as agricultural and economic powerhouse, the effects will be all the more devastating. In a 2015 paper, a team of USGS researchers tried to sum up the myriad toxic substances that would be stirred up and spread around by massive storms and floods. The valley’s southernmost county, Kern, is a case study in the region’s vulnerabilities. I don’t think the city will ever rise from the shock, I don’t see how it can. “Setting aside a repeat of 1862, these less intense events could still seriously test the limits of our water infrastructure.” Like other efforts to map climate change onto California’s weather, this one found that drought years characterized by low winter precipitation would likely increase—in this case, by a factor of as much as two, compared with mid-20th-century patterns. The last ARkStorm hit California back in 1862, as this video from the USGS explains. It seems here more than elsewhere the natural order of things. As floodwater gathered in the valley, it formed a vast, muddy, wind-roiled lake, its size “rivaling that of Lake Superior,” covering the entire Central Valley floor, from the southern slopes of the Cascade Mountains near the Oregon border to the Tehachapis, south of Bakersfield, with depths in some places exceeding 15 feet. Indeed, it’s already happening. To get their heads around how to construct a reasonable approximation of a megastorm, the team’s meteorologists went looking for well-documented 20th-century events that could serve as a model. Even so, Jones said the evacuation went as smoothly as could be expected, and likely would have saved thousands of lives if the dam had burst. Plant species that thrive in freshwater suggest wet periods, as heavy runoff from the mountains crowds out seawater. Jones worked as a seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey for 33 years and has spent the better part of her life helping communities and leaders prepare for inevitable disasters. Between 1860 and 1870, California’s cattle herd, concentrated in the valley, plunged from 3 million to 630,000. “But there are some things you can’t prepare for.” Obviously, getting area residents to safety was the first priority, but animal inhabitants were vulnerable, too. The following animation depicts ARkStorm precipitation (rain and snow) in inches. Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. Work on a new report is getting underway. With California’s 2020 rainy season now underway, imagine almost a month of drenching storms along the entire West Coast. The event would be similar to exceptionally intense California storms tha… And California, it turns out, is the prime spot in the western side of the northern hemisphere for catching them at full force during the winter months. Wedged between the Sierra Nevada to the east and the Coast Ranges to the west, it’s one of the globe’s greatest expanses of fertile soil and temperate weather. In the region’s teeming twenty-first-century urban areas, those vital sanitation services would become major threats. It's us but for your ears. This story was adapted from Perilous Bounty copyright © 2020. In the late 1990s, scientists discovered that these “pineapple expresses,” as TV weather presenters call them, are a subset of a global weather phenomenon: long, wind-driven plumes of vapor about a mile above the sea that carry moisture from warm areas near the equator on a northeasterly path to colder, drier regions toward the poles. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2021 demands. As we are now learning, those decades-long arid stretches were just as regularly interrupted by enormous storms—many even grander than the one that began in December 1861. Barely a decade after being claimed as a US state, California was plunged in an economic crisis. Most metropolitan parts of the Bay Area escape severe damage, but swaths of Los Angeles and Orange Counties experience “extensive flooding.”, Los Angeles flooding in the ARkStorm Scenario, As Jones stressed to me in our conversation, the ARkStorm scenario is a cautious approximation; a megastorm that matches 1862 or its relatively recent antecedents could plausibly bury the entire Central Valley underwater, northern tip to southern. The rancheros were forced to sell their land to white settlers at pennies per acre, and by 1870, “many rancheros had become day laborers in the towns,” Jelinek reports. "This was a multiweek, extreme precipitation and flood event that essentially filled up a significant portion of the Central Valley with flood water, creating an inland sea, supposedly 40 miles wide and 150 miles long," UCLA Climate Scientist Daniel Swain said. All in all, thousands of people died, “one-third of the state’s property was destroyed, and one home in eight was destroyed completely or carried away by the floodwaters.” As for farming, the 1862 megaflood transformed valley agriculture, playing a decisive role in creating today’s Anglo-dominated, crop-oriented agricultural powerhouse: a 19th-century example of the “disaster capitalism” that Naomi Klein describes in her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine. So an event expected to happen on average every 200 years will now happen every 65 or so. They took California’s long pattern of droughts and floods and mapped it onto the climate models based on data specific to the region, looking out to century’s end. ", "It's not something that has to be scary necessarily," Curry said. Today, the Central Valley houses nearly 4 million beef and dairy cows. Kern’s farmers lead the entire nation in agricultural output by dollar value, annually producing $7 billion worth of foodstuffs like almonds, grapes, citrus, pistachios, and milk. Water scarcity, it turns out, isn’t the only menace that stalks California valleys that stock our supermarkets. Meteorologists have known for decades that those tempests that descend upon California over the winter—and from which the state receives the great bulk of its annual precipitation—carry moisture from the South Pacific. In a normal year, Brewer reported, San Francisco received about 20 inches. Published by Bloomsbury USA. Bordered on all sides by mountains, the Central Valley stretches 450 miles long, is on average 50 miles wide, and occupies a land mass of 18,000 square miles, or 11.5 million acres—roughly equivalent in size to Massachusetts and Vermont combined. The evacuation order “unleashed a flood of its own, sending tens of thousands of cars simultaneously onto undersize roads, creating hours-long backups that left residents wondering if they would get to high ground before floodwaters overtook them,” the Sacramento Bee reported. Again, in the ARkStorm scenario, Kern County gets hit hard by rain but mostly escapes the worst flooding. "Individuals need to know what their risks are, know where you live and and have a plan for your family to manage an emergency and be able to get the instructions from your local leadership," Curry said. Officials and experts call it the “ARkStorm,” and it is the other “big one” few are talking about. Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox. They were shocked to learn that the previous 1,800 years had about six events that were more severe than 1862, along with several more that were roughly of the same magnitude. Although the dam ultimately held up, the Oroville incident illustrates the challenges of moving hundreds of thousands of people out of harm’s way on short notice. In November and December of 1861, heavy snowfall had covered the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. Jones said the initial reaction to the 2011 release of the ARkStorm report among California’s policymakers and emergency managers was skepticism: “Oh, no, that’s too big—it’s impossible,” they would say. As the tropical Pacific Ocean and the atmosphere just above it warm, more seawater evaporates, feeding ever bigger atmospheric rivers gushing toward the California coast. The southern part, the San Joaquin Valley, gets off lighter; but a miles-wide band of floodwater collects in the lowest-elevation regions, ballooning out to encompass the expanse that was once the Tulare Lake bottom and stretching to the valley’s southern extreme. Terms of Service apply. Jones and Swain have been sounding the alarm for about a decade about what could happen if a similar storm happened today. The ARkStorm Scenario combines pre-historical geologic flood history in California with modern flood mapping and climate-change projections to produce a hypothetical, but plausible scenario aimed at preparing the emergency response community for this type of hazard: The 2020 California wildfire season was characterized by a record-setting year of wildfires that burned across the state of California as measured during the modern era of wildfire management and record keeping. California's Office of Emergency Services has spent years developing plans for "mega storms.". “Such a desolate scene I hope never to see again,” he wrote: “Most of the city is still under water, and has been for three months…Every low place is full—cellars and yards are full, houses and walls wet, everything uncomfortable.” The “better class of houses” were in rough shape, Brewer observed, but “it is with the poorer classes that this is the worst.” He went on: “Many of the one-story houses are entirely uninhabitable; others, where the floors are above the water are, at best, most wretched places in which to live.” He summarized the scene: 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. But Ingram and Dettinger’s work pulls the lens back to view the broader timescale, revealing the region’s swings between megadroughts and megastorms—ones more than severe enough to challenge concentrated food production, much less dense population centers. If you would like to help make sure Transparent California remains online and current, please consider making a tax-deductible donation today. Barely a year after Brewer’s sunny initial descent from a ship in San Francisco Bay, he was back in the city, on a break. Could it really be submerged under fifteen feet of water again—and what would that mean? Traffic collisions were occurring. If Kern County were a state, it would be the nation’s seventh-leading oil-producing one, churning out twice as much crude as Louisiana. People were utilizing the shoulder, driving the wrong way. They carry so much moisture—often more than twenty-five times the flow of the Mississippi River, over thousands of miles—that they’ve been dubbed “atmospheric rivers.”. The treaty terms met with vigorous resentment from white settlers eager to shift from gold mining to growing food for the new state’s burgeoning cities. His study looked purely at precipitation, independent of whether it fell as rain or snow. And that was enough to flood one-quarter of the property in California," Jones said. A hundred years ago, when electrification was taking off, extended power outages caused inconveniences. “Nearly one-quarter of the total building square footage in California is affected by flooding in ARkStorm, with little variation of this ratio between occupancy classes (fig. As the spillway teetered on the edge of collapse, officials ordered the evacuation of 188,000 people in the communities below. , 10.1061/(ASCE)NH.1527-6996.0000174 , A4015001 Year Published: 2016 It’s also home to two large oil refineries. FERC called on the state to invest in a “more robust and resilient design” to prevent a future cataclysm. Between 1950 and 2010, Ingram and Dettinger write, atmospheric rivers “caused more than 80 percent of flooding in California rivers and 81 percent of the 128 most well-documented levee breaks in California’s Central Valley.”. With California’s 2020 rainy season now underway, imagine almost a month of drenching storms along the entire West Coast. Swain believes roughly 1% of the state's 400,000 people died -- but there is no official number of casualties. With California’s 2020 rainy season now underway, imagine almost a month of drenching storms along the entire West Coast. Then there’s the transformation of farming since then. It would cause thousands of landslides, major dam failures and decimate the state's entire agriculture industry. "But what government needs to be doing for us is being the guarantor of the future. In addition to the potentially vast human toll, there’s also the fact that the Central Valley has emerged as a major linchpin of the US and global food system. In other words, the same patterns that make California vulnerable to droughts also make it ripe for floods. People look on as water rushes down the Oroville Dam spillway on Feb. 9, 2017 in Oroville, Calif. MORE: Devastating wildfires, extreme weather raise concerns about lack of preparedness for climate change, MORE: From wildfires to disease, here are the top 5 ways climate change is already hurting your health, MORE: 'Waging war on nature': UN chief delivers dire warning about climate change, MORE: How climate change affects wildfires, like those in the West, and makes them worse, MORE: Amazon, General Motors, Walmart and more call climate action a 'business imperative', MORE: Greenland's largest glaciers could lose more ice than previously predicted if emissions continue as 'business as usual'. The Great Flood of 1862 was no one-off black-swan event. That same year, the agency assembled a team of 117 scientists, engineers, public-policy experts, and insurance experts to model what kind of impact a monster storm event would have on modern California. Late in 1861, the state suddenly emerged from a two-decade dry spell when monster storms began lashing the west coast from Baja California to present-day Washington State. Copyright © 2021 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress. Today, the valley has a population of 6.5 million people and boasts the state’s three fastest-growing counties. The task of completing the fieldwork fell to the 32-year-old Brewer, a Yale-trained botanist who had studied cutting-edge agricultural science in Europe. Between eight and 11 atmospheric rivers hit California every year, the great majority of them doing no major damage, and they deliver between 30 and 50 percent of the state’s rain and snow. Starting in 2008, the USGS set out to answer just that question, launching a project called the ARkStorm (for “atmospheric river 1,000 storm”) Scenario. Disasters typically associated with the West Coast include devastating earthquakes and out-of-control wildfires, but there's an epic disaster that could be far worse than both -- and it could happen at any point. In the wake of the 2017 near-disaster at Oroville, state agencies spent more than $1 billion repairing the damaged dam and bolstering it for future storms. The second was that they figured a smaller-than-1862 catastrophe would help build public buy-in, by making the project hard to dismiss as an unrealistic figment of scaremongering bureaucrats. At the time of the Great Flood, the Central Valley was still mainly cattle ranches, the farming boom a ways off. Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights. 2020 Fire Season. For one thing, it’s much more populous. On January 8, 2020 the California Resiliency Alliance hosted a webinar on the USGS ARkStorm Scenario. They are used to it. wildfires have already burned 1.4 million acres, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Harvey in 2017, join us with a tax-deductible donation today. By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from Mother Jones and our partners. Kern is also one of the nation’s most prodigious oil-producing counties. At least some of the region’s remnant indigenous population saw the epic flood coming and took precautions to escape devastation, Ingram reports, quoting an item in the Nevada City Democrat on January 11, 1862: We are informed that the Indians living in the vicinity of Marysville left their abodes a week or more ago for the foothills predicting an unprecedented overflow. “The weather is perfectly heavenly,” he enthused in a letter to his brother back east. The deadly storm of 1861 and 1862 fundamentally changed California. All the roads in the middle of the state are “impassable, so all mails are cut off.” Telegraph service, which had only recently been connected to the East Coast through the Central Valley, stalled. California's 'trillion dollar' mega disaster no one is talking about There's a push to prepare for flooding that could hit parts of the West Coast.... \By Jon Schlosberg, Ginger Zee, Stephanie Ebbs, and Lindsey Griswold December 4, 2020. Low-lying Tulare County houses nearly 500,000 dairy cows, with 258 operations holding on average 1,800 cattle each. A quarter of the buildings in the state could flood, with the impact especially catastrophic as only 12% of California property is insured for flooding. California's deadliest and most-destructive natural disaster in recorded history, a so-called "mega storm," hit the state in the winter of 1861 and 1862. The county houses more than 156,000 dairy cows in facilities averaging 3,200 head each. Rendering by USGS of what flooded levees would look like. A rendering of what a "mega ARkStorm" could look like is pictured on the cover of the USGS Open-File Report 2010-1312, "Overview of the ARkStorm Scenario." Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation. “Our [hypothetical storm] only had total rain for twenty-five days, while there were forty-five days in 1861 to ’62,” Jones said. They called on the state geographer to deliver a “full and scientific description of the state’s rocks, fossils, soils, and minerals, and its botanical and zoological productions, together with specimens of same.”. And “earthquake kits” are common gear in closets and garages all along the San Andreas Fault, where the next Big One lurks. In the 160 years since the botanist set foot on the West Coast, California has transformed from an agricultural backwater to one of the jewels of the US food system. In a massive storm, floodwaters could pick up a substantial amount of highly toxic petroleum and byproducts. And how bad the next "mega storm" might be, and when it might take place, is in flux because of climate change. In a study released in December 2019, a team from the US Army Corps of Engineers and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that atmospheric-river storms accounted for 84 percent of insured flood damages in the western United States between 1978 and 2017; the 13 biggest storms wrought more than half the damage. We know that before human civilization began spewing millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere annually, California was due “one megaflood every 100 to 200 years”—and the last one hit more than a century and a half ago. "We absolutely have done a lot of work to consider the effects of climate change on all of this," Curry told ABC News.If 1% of California's population died today as a result of a new ARkStorm … Today the valley is increasingly given over to intensive almond, pistachio, and grape plantations, representing billions of dollars of investments in crops that take years to establish, are expected to flourish for decades, and could be wiped out by a flood. Want to see what a quake reaching 7.8 on the Richter scale would look like along the San Andreas Fault? The state’s long-awaited high-speed train, if it’s ever completed, will place Fresno residents within an hour of Silicon Valley, driving up its appeal as a bedroom community. That was the question posed by Daniel Swain and a team of researchers at UCLA’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences in a series of studies, the first of which was published in 2018. Yet floods tend to be less feared than rival horsemen of the apocalypse in the state’s oft-stimulated imagination of disaster. They plunged ahead anyway, for two reasons. Prior to the event, valley land was still largely owned by Mexican rancheros who held titles dating to Spanish rule. Finally. Californians are rightly terrified of fires like the ones that roared through the northern Sierra Nevada foothills and coastal canyons near Los Angeles in the fall of 2018, killing nearly 100 people and fouling air for miles around, or the current LNU Lightning Complex fire that has destroyed nearly 1,000 structures and killed five people in the region between Sacramento and San Francisco. It’s an unsettling journey into the disaster-haunted regions most responsible for our food supply, with an exploration of possible solutions. California Department of Motor Vehicles As Ingram and Dettinger note, atmospheric rivers are the primary vector for California’s floods. Hazards Rev. For more articles read aloud: download the Audm iPhone app. ARkStorm on ABCNews. It might sound like a scene from a post apocalyptic movie, but this type of storm is not only possible, it's happened before. Ingram has emerged as a kind of Cassandra of drought and flood risks in the western United States. Meteorologists, by contrast, are fixated on accurate prediction of near-future events; “creating a synthetic event wasn’t something they had ever done.” They couldn’t just re-create the 1862 event, because most of the information we have about it is piecemeal, from eyewitness accounts and sediment samples. California has a long history of widespread floods," Tina Curry, the deputy director of Cal OES, told ABC News. An ARkStorm (for atmospheric river 1,000 storm) is a hypothetical but scientifically realistic "megastorm" scenario developed and published by the Multi Hazards Demonstration Project (MHDP) of the United States Geological Survey, based on historical occurrences. What they found isn’t comforting. Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism? November 2, 2020 at 9:20 p.m. We may be heading into another drought, but must prepare for the alternative as well. There's a push to prepare for flooding that could hit parts of the West Coast. Inexpensive, too! Left, California today. Brewer went on to recount scenes from the Central Valley that would fit in a Hollywood disaster epic. Back then, just around 500,000 people lived in the entire state, and the Central Valley was a sparsely populated badland. Stereoscope photo of J Street in Sacrament during the 1862 flood. Easy, she said. In other words, the Great Flood was a preview of what scientists expect to see again, and soon. Since California grows a majority of our country's crops, the impact would be felt across the entire country. Officials and experts call it the “ARkStorm,” and it is the other “big one” few are talking about. While the ARkStorm reckoning did not estimate a death toll, it warned of a “substantial loss of life” because “flood depths in some areas could realistically be on the order of 10–20 feet.”. The opposite—catastrophic flooding—also occupies a niche in what Mike Davis, the great chronicler of Southern California’s sociopolitical geography, has called the state’s “ecology of fear.” Indeed, his classic book of that title opens with an account of a 1995 deluge that saw “million-dollar homes tobogganed off their hill-slope perches” and small children and pets “sucked into the deadly vortices of the flood channels.”. "The flood flooded a quarter of the homes in California. Summarizing the science, Ingram and USGS researcher Michael Dettinger deliver the dire news: A flood comparable to—and sometimes much more intense than—the 1861–1862 catastrophe occurred sometime between 1235–1360, 1395–1410, 1555–1615, 1750–1770, and 1810–1820; “that is, one megaflood every 100 to 200 years.” They also discovered that the 1862 flood didn’t appear in the sediment record in some sites that showed evidence of multiple massive events—suggesting that it was actually smaller than many of the floods that have inundated California over the centuries. And as if that weren’t enough, California is also a national hub for milk production. With California’s 2020 rainy season now underway, imagine almost a month of drenching storms along the entire West Coast. "We absolutely have done a lot of work to consider the effects of climate change on all of this," Curry told ABC News.
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