The flood this time?

Earthquakes, wildfires and the odd outbreak of road rage ought to be sufficient cause for anxiety, and we have no desire to be alarmists. It is, however, worth recalling in the midst of this sodden week that the most materially destructive natural disaster ever to strike California involved neither trembling earth nor unchecked flame, but a flood — the Great Flood of 1862 — and it began at precisely this time of year.

On Christmas Eve 1861 it began to rain in Los Angeles, and by the end of January, 35 inches of water had fallen on what’s now the civic center. At winter’s end, a rain gauge near the coast at what’s now Playa Vista had recorded 50 inches of precipitation. Most of the Los Angeles Basin was a lake, as were the San Gabriel, San Bernardino and Hemet valleys. Thousands of cattle, fruit trees and vineyards on which the region’s economy then depended were swept away in a deluge that accelerated the demise of the great ranchos, whose owners needed to sell hides and crops to pay their taxes.

Climatologists now think that the storm pattern that created the Great Flood was, like the one we’re experiencing now, the product of subtropical moisture moving northwest out of the Pacific in a chain of storms stretching back to Southeast Asia. Something similar appears to have happened in 1938, when Southern California again was hit with massive flooding that killed 115 and destroyed more than 5,600 homes.

Now, as we said, there’s no reason to be alarmed, but like these storms, the deluge of 1862 was general up and down the state. About a quarter of all California’s taxable real estate was destroyed and, as a consequence, the state’s government went bankrupt. Our new governor and the Legislature might want to take note of that, because for 18 months afterward the state’s chief executive and its lawmakers went without pay.