When you think of natural disasters in California, your
mind’s eye naturally envisions earthquakes. And for good reason, the
Pacific-North American plate boundary, manifested by the San Andres fault,
slices through California from the Salton Sea north to northern California’s
Point Delgada.
It turns out that flooding from ‘atmospheric’ rivers is
capable of causing as much or more damage to California as a magnitude 8
earthquake. The ‘Great Flood of 1862’, the result of 45 straight days of rain,
transformed central California into a 300-mile sea. A similar event today could
swamp 25% of the state and cause $725 billion in damages according to a report
by Adam
Brinklow of the Curbed San Francisco.
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| Atmospheric River (AR) descending on CA Feb 2017 |
This weekend California is on watch for its second atmospheric
river event of the winter of 2017. No one anticipates a mega-storm like that of
1862, but flooding and infrastructure are likely to occur.
For more on the
impacts of a mega-storm see the US Geological Survey’s ‘Overview of the
ARkStorm Scenario’ released in 2010.
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| Blue inboard of coast shows potential flood zones of AR. |
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