El Nino for President!

El Nino for President Banner, Berkeley, 2015
Courtesy of Alison Moore

Even as wary Californians fear that the promised El Nino may be slipping away, the old adage, "Be careful what you wish for,” comes to mind. The water story in the settled West has often been one of feast or famine: punishing drought followed by often damaging and deadly floods.

Among California’s most notorious weather events was the “Great Flood” of 1861–62, then the largest in the recorded history of the West and, as the New York Times reported, the “most disastrous flood that has occurred since its settlement by white men.” Although it did not occur in an El Nino year, a perfect storm of conditions conspired to create . . . the perfect storm.

Cycles of Drought and Flood

“And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Alongside its promise of idyllic weather, California delivers cycles of floods and droughts. Our climate history demonstrates stretches of drought interspersed with heavy—and sometimes catastrophic—rains.

As our state struggles through a five-year drought and an El Nino winter, we find ourselves in the seemingly paradoxical period of simultaneous flooding and drought. And, as B. Lynn Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam write in The West without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us about Tomorrow, “Climatologists now speak in terms of even deeper droughts, and larger and more frequent floods, for the future.”

Two images in the California Historical Society’s collection exemplify these two climatic events.