The Central Valley of CA they speak of is about 300+ miles long by ~50 mi wide (roughly, Chico to Bakersfield). In 1868 the CA population was somewhere around 500,000. Most of the whites at that time had immigrated to the area, so one might suspect that since they had survived a 1500-mile cross-country migration or trips around Cape Horn, they had at least some sense and survival instincts. Of the six million that live there now, I'm sure the ratio has changed.

That article might lead you to believe that the ARK storms of 1861-62 were the last atmospheric river storms that happened in CA, and they weren't. I was in one in SoCal in 1969, and there was another one in 1986 in NoCal. Marty Ralph, an atmospheric scientist of NOAA said that the two of them together would be the flooding equivalent of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (about a magnitude of 8).

Maybe these weren't as serious as the earlier ones, but they certainly did a lot of damage.

Like other storms I've noticed, it followed a year with a disastrous fire. The Canyon Fire of 1968 burned over 20,000 acres of the mountains and foothills, fanned by the infamous hot, drying Santa Ana winds.

The first storm (January) produced 10 days of heavy rain, and then two days that produced 30" of rain, saturating the soil. The next storm hit in February and the whole area was overflowing with water. But I faintly remember rather constant rain, and that someone said it had rained every day for 45 or 48 days at one point, and my boss made a joke about Noah being luckier.

My boss had the fires right down to the block wall of his hillside home, so the hills above were mostly bare. Many of the usually-dry riverbeds (not concrete 'flood control channels') had bottlenecks where large metal grates had been installed with concrete. The home-building had been progressing up the hills, and many of the people who lived beside these channels used them as handy dumping areas. The debris washed downward and backed up behind the grates in the first storm. The water backed up behind the debris 'plugs' during the second storm. But the grates weren't meant to take that much pressure, and a little after 6 a.m. one morning, they started giving way.

One of our clients was waiting in the parking lot of the vet clinic where I worked. She was wearing a bathrobe, her kids in their pajamas. She said she had just seen her husband off to work when their St. Bernard started whining and scratching at the back door. She opened the door, but he wouldn't go out, just listened, very agitated. She stepped out with her coffee cup to see if there was a raccoon in the garbage can again, and saw an 8-ft wave of mud, boulders, bushes, trees and other debris slowly rolling out of the little canyon behind them. She grabbed the kids out of their beds and ran for the Jeep, jumped in with the dog, and took off down the hill. She said all she could think to do to warn the neighbors was to keep her hand on the horn all the way down.

Above the old Monrovia Nursery, another channel of water and mud had broken loose, rolling right down the street and through the bus stop where, 20 minutes later, people would have been collecting. The mud was about three feet deep, with boulders, fence posts and barbed wire, and a dead horse mixed in the mess.

My boss said the mud rolled down to his house off the bare slopes like pudding. It flowed until it hit the block wall, then found the edge and went down the driveway and surrounded the front and side of his attached garage. It flowed down to his neighbor's home (no wall) and slowly filled up the front patio, rising four feet up the face of his sliding glass door (it didn't break, but it sure did leak!). My boss's friend heard and arrived with two sons and a backhoe sort of thing with a big scoop on the front. The three men kept that backhoe running up and down the street 24 hrs a day for a couple of days (it continued to rain), saving his home and those of his few immediate neighbors. The water seeped out of the mud and filled his garage and two cars halfway up the doors with muddy, stinky water.

Someone's home had a six-foot boulder roll right through it, followed by mud and debris. Another photo showed the roof of a home, all that could be seen, the rest buried in mud to the eaves.

I don't know if Glendora was the hardest hit, or it just seemed so because I was working there and exposed to so many horror stories, but the National Geographic magazine, Oct. 1969, showed photos of the flooding and damaged homes. Over 100 people died.

Computer mockups can't touch the real thing.

Sue