On the morning of January 10, 1862, businessman and railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, who later lent his name to Stanford University, left his mansion in downtown Sacramento and walked about five blocks away. I was on my way to the State Capitol. Stanford was preparing to take office as the eighth Governor of California. But he had to abandon his grandiose plans to travel in style in a carriage. Sacramento lay under 18 feet (about 18 feet) of water in the river after his second major flood in the area in months. Weeks of heavy rains have breached the banks of the American and Sacramento rivers. While residents fled in droves, the governor-elect may have traveled to the Capitol by rowboat. You can imagine oars fading into brown darkness as the ruined remains of the city float in the air.

By the time Stanford returned home with his hands on the Bible, the flood waters were so high that Stanford and his wife re-entered the mansion through a second-floor window. “Scenes of horror . . . ignoring the description,” a guest at the Stanford University inauguration later wrote. Strong men struggling for life in the currents of our streets, many men and women of all ages clinging to their homes and floodplains, screaming in despair, some sinking to death, the flood still more. I’m awake!” After all, it rained for more than 40 days. The deluge spread from Oregon to San Diego and east to Utah and Arizona. Sacramento has been in the water for months. Congress and the governor’s office temporarily moved to San Francisco. (The state’s Supreme Court moved there and never left.) Thousands of people are believed to have died. More cattle died and drought continued, forcing the state to abandon much of its livestock economy in favor of crops.

The storm that has hit the state since December 31, 2022 is reminiscent of the deluge that plagued the inauguration of Stanford University.It’s been windy for the past few days collapsed Plant a 100-year-old tree in your car or home in Sacramento.ocean waves wiped out Part of Capitol Pier in Santa Cruz County.in the river Beyond Their abilities flow beyond banks into residential neighborhoods and homes.President Biden Declared Emergency; tens of thousands of people evacuated.

Meteorologists and climate scientists have identified these recent storms as atmospheric rivers, or columns of vapor moving through the atmosphere that carry moisture from the tropics. Atmospheric rivers over the Pacific Ocean contain as much water as the Mississippi River. Releasing moisture in the form of rain or snow can leave death and destruction in its wake. On Wednesday night, with only 11 days to go until 2023, air rivers have already claimed the lives of at least 18 Californians. A two-year-old boy was struck by a fallen tree at his home in Sonoma County. Rescuers are still looking for a 5-year-old boy who was swept out of his car by floodwaters in San Luis Obispo County.

The Great Flood of 1861-62 and its lessons remained largely out of public memory until a 2010 study called ARkStorm (short for Atmospheric River Thousand Year Storm), funded by state and federal agencies. was gone. Deluge. (The name suggests that such events occur every 1,000 years, but the geological record indicates that they actually occur every 100 to 200 years.) —About 7250 It will result in billions of dollars in damage and economic losses.

Curiously, that broad multi-agency study did not take climate change into account. In 2010, “climate was a pressing issue,” Carla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources, who works under Gov. Gavin Newsom, told me last summer. But funding climate change research required a great deal of political will because few people experienced life-threatening climate disasters at the time, Nemeth said. It has been difficult to convince Californians that climate change could cause a deadly influx of excess water, especially during years of drought.

Recently, a research team co-led by UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain updated their 2010 report to take into account human-induced climate change. So far, ARkStorm 2.0’s results make the original study’s alarming predictions twice as frightening as his. “Climate change over the past 100 years has doubled the risk of a series of extreme winter storms that can cause widespread and severe flooding,” Swain and his research partners wrote in the Journal. wrote in the abstract of the study published in scientific progress, last August. Still, scientists struggle to sustain research funding. “I think there’s an interesting undercurrent that you don’t want to know, because you have to actually deal with the problem,” Swain told me last year.

As the ongoing storm in California increasingly dominates news headlines, Sacramento leaders appear to be beginning to acknowledge the threat.Earlier this week, Newsom Proposed In his 2023 budget, $202 million in funding for flood protection supplements $738 million invested in flood protection programs over the past two years. Swain has a renewed interest in his work. Regarding ARkStorm 2.0, he said: Swain speaks regularly with stakeholders like Nemeth, who has supported ARkStorm’s research since its inception. “I think I scared her a little bit,” he told me. That fear may be what the rest of the state needs to embrace.

In June 2022, I attended the annual California Extreme Precipitation Symposium in Folsom, about 30 minutes east of Sacramento. About 60 in-person attendees gathered in a hotel conference room to join online participants in thinking about the forces and dangers of surface rivers such as the American, Sacramento, and Russian rivers, and both. flow through the sky Meteorologists and hydrologists (almost everyone in attendance seemed to be government experts of some sort) spoke about changes in atmospheric rivers and watersheds, and a plethora of forecasting techniques that purportedly help avert disasters.

The tone was clinical and calm. With a few exceptions, the presenters gave the impression that things were under control, thanks in part to human ingenuity. It seemed unlikely that the destruction caused by the great flood of 1861-62 would be repeated. “We built all these dams upstream,” Gary Estes, who has run the symposium since 1994, told me. “We have a new spillway, we have a predictive reservoir operation.

Afterwards, one of the presenters, Gary Bardini of the Sacramento Area Flood Control Authority, took us on a tour of the flood prevention projects in the area. It was the second day of summer, the air was a muggy 97 degrees, and the green vegetation had already turned yellow. For three hours, we explored miles of Sacramento countryside, walking along weirs and levees under construction. A dump with tires twice as tall as him His truck passed us in front of us, hauling dirt like so many ants and what Baldini and his fellow engineers wanted Built, created an impenetrable barrier.

Baldini spoke of past floods, including one in 1986 when a levee breached near the confluence of the Yuba and Feather rivers. soaking wet 4,000 homes were damaged, resulting in nearly $500 million in damage. Standing outside in the heat of the summer, surrounded by signs of a major drought in California, I could understand why water disasters are hard to imagine until they actually happen. But imagination is exactly what climate change demands.

The state’s fight against catastrophic floods will depend in part on residents who need to be prepared even when water is barely visible. Even progressive California funds research and flood mitigation projects. or lack the political will to fund misinformation about the climate crisis. ” — keep getting in the way. But Swain told me there are encouraging signs that ARkStorm 2.0 could be fully funded soon. can be specified.

The storm currently soaking California has yet to reach ARkStorm 2.0 proportions. For such a catastrophe to occur, it would take several more weeks of continuous extreme precipitation that is not currently predicted. Yet Swain, like other scientists, sees what he thinks about the direct effects of human activity on changing the Earth’s atmosphere. “As temperatures rise, the atmosphere’s ability to hold water vapor increases,” he told me. “So we’re probably at a point where extreme precipitation events are about 10 to 15 percent more intense than they used to be, on average globally.” The next big one could be even worse. ♦