Saratoga News

Saratoga Stereopticon

Willys Peck

El Niño of today is the 100-year storm of yesterday

Back in 1955, even though the term El Niño had not yet worked its way into the meteorological vocabulary, we were experiencing much the same results around here. To paraphrase Shakespeare, El Niño by any other name would rain as hard, and the storm I'm referring to, known variously as the Christmas Week Flood or the 100-year storm, was a doozy.

It rained hard for a solid week, practically without letup. Then, on Dec. 22, all hell--in the moisture sense--broke loose statewide. Up north at the confluence of the Yuba and Feather rivers, Marysville and Yuba City went under. So did Santa Cruz, where the flooding of the San Lorenzo River coincided with a high tide. Pacific Avenue, now Pacific Garden Mall, was under six feet of water. The city was without power, and a good many residents were evacuated to schools and churches on the high ground.

I remember Santa Cruz in particular because, as a reporter on the San Jose Mercury--the News was still an afternoon paper--I was assigned to cover the story. That night, a photographer and I drove over the hill to find out what we could. I remember that trip over Highway 17 for the all-enveloping blackness, the fallen trees along the way and the fact that we were about the only car on the road. As to the resulting newspaper story, it practically wrote itself.

Meanwhile, Saratoga, being at the base of the foothills and on relatively high ground, didn't have the same kind of problems. The exception involved people who lived close to the creek. That flooding was exacerbated by the fact that at least one pile of gravel up at the county quarry, on Congress Springs Road (Highway 9) a short distance before Pierce Road, got washed into the creek, raising the stream bed appreciably and causing the water to spread out to areas it wouldn't otherwise have reached.

I remember being part of a Saratoga Lions Club crew that pitched in to remove the furniture from the flood-ravaged home of a fellow member. And although I didn't see it, I was told that a pickup truck that had been parked near the creek was swept downstream in the torrent, which ran--and still runs--through my property behind the house. Power was out for several days in Saratoga, and my wife and I were grateful for the kerosene lamps in our antiques-cluttered house. The lamps are still here, for use as needed.

Back in Los Gatos, the reservoir behind Lexington Dam, completed only three years earlier, filled for the first time. That dam had been an object of both fear and derision in the town. There was the former mayor who had declared he wouldn't continue to live in Los Gatos if the dam was built, and he cited the danger of flooding if it ever broke. But the dam was built, and he stayed on.

On the other hand, the publisher of the Los Gatos Times newspaper took frequent journalistic potshots at the monolithic earth-fill, ridiculing it as "old never-full."

Then came December 1955, and along came San Jose City Manager Anthony P. "Dutch" Hamann, unabashedly crediting Lexington Dam with saving his city. Maybe not the whole city, but Los Gatos Creek and the Guadalupe River converge just north of Santa Clara Street, and the former stream, unchecked, could have wreaked real havoc.

Almost 20 years earlier, the Guadalupe's flow had been curbed by a water-conservation reservoir upstream, but if the full fury of Los Gatos Creek had been allowed through, it would have been disastrous. As it was, even with the two dams, the combined flow from those streams almost reached the roadway of the Julian Street bridge.

There's a personal postscript to the Santa Cruz flooding. A year or so later, I heard about a job printing shop on Pacific Avenue that was changing over to offset printing and selling off its lead type. I bought several cases of the type to use in my own job press and, even today, when I use those fonts, I still have to clean the flood-deposited silt from the interstices in letters like "O," "P" and "R."

Rainfall totals are what put these phenomena in perspective, and I'm indebted to Vince Garrod, who has records dating back to 1936 from the family property on Mt. Eden Road, for some relevant figures. Having been taken in the hills, these readings are higher than those in the Village area. Vince tells me that 18.3 inches fell during the first nine days of this month. The highest February total he recorded was 20 inches in 1980. The total for December 1955, the 100-year storm, was 22 inches. Is this where we're headed?

If you have any weather-savvy friends whom you can ask for some kind of estimate on how long the present El Niño will last, just don't take Noah for an answer.

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