Causes and duration
- Atmospheric River: The event was not caused by an El Niño, but by a series of powerful atmospheric rivers that targeted the West Coast.
- Duration: The storms lasted for roughly 45 days, with continuous precipitation from November 1861 to January 1862.
- Precipitation: Some areas received over 9 feet of rain in 60 days, while the Central Valley was hit by 10-15 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada.
Impacts
- Flooding: The Central Valley became a 300-mile-long inland sea, and flooding extended from the Columbia River in Oregon to Mexico.
- Sacramento: The state capital was submerged for months, forcing state legislators to row to the capitol building for their inauguration and temporarily relocate to San Francisco.
- Economic impact:
- Deaths: An estimated 4,000 people died.
- Cattle: 200,000 cattle (25% of the state's total) drowned or starved.
- Property: One-third of California's property was destroyed, and the state became bankrupt, with employees unpaid for 18 months.
- Other impacts:
- Significant damage was caused to farms, towns, and mining operations.
- In Los Angeles, 66 inches of rain fell in 1862, more than four times the average, causing widespread destruction.
- The disaster significantly altered California's economy from ranching to agriculture.
Modern relevance
- ARkStorm: Scientists now study the 1861-1862 event as a model for future potential megafloods, referring to it as the ARkStorm scenario.
- Repeat events: Paleoclimate research indicates that such extreme weather events have occurred roughly every 200 years over the past 2,000 years.
For more detailed scientific information, you can explore the original research articles from the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes and NOAA. To learn about the modern ARkStorm scenario and its implications, you can visit Weather West. For a broader context on the history of the flood, you can read Scientific American's article.
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The Great Flood of 1862 was the largest flood in the recorded history of California, Oregon, and Nevada, inundating the Western United States and portions ...
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Jan 1, 2013 — The only megaflood to strike the American West in recent history occurred during the winter of 1861-62. California bore the brunt of the damage.
The Great Flood of 1862 was the largest recorded flood in the history of California, Nevada, and Oregon. It occurred following several weeks of continuous rain ...
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Pacific Ocean began to pound central California on Christmas Eve in
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Jun 25, 2023 — The Big Flood of 1862, the largest in the history of the West Coast, ruined the livelihoods of almost every farmer and rancher in the nascent ...
Aug 29, 2020 — Between 1860 and 1870, California's cattle herd, concentrated in the valley, plunged from 3 million to 630,000.
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