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Saratoga Stereopticon
The storm of '55 was one for the record books
By Willys Peck
As this column is being written, less than a week before Christmas, the sun is shining, there are a few fleecy clouds in the sky and the temperature is, well, mild for this time of year, with a forecast for more of the same over the next few days.
With my penchant for the past, it seems quite natural to compare this with 45 years ago, when the climatic conditions were, to understate things, different. Nineteen fifty-five was the year of the Christmas Week Flood, the hundred-year storm that changed the way Californians thought about a lot of things concerning water. It rained, and rained hard, for a solid week. Then, I think it was on the 23rd, things gave way all at once. In the Sacramento Valley, Marysville and Yuba City went under, courtesy of the Feather River. Up the Peninsula, San Francisquito Creek did a number on Palo Alto. And over on the coast, the concurrence of a high tide and flood stage on the San Lorenzo River put downtown Santa Cruz under several feet of water.
Saratoga didn't exactly escape. For one thing, we were without electricity for several days. Picturesque Saratoga Creek, where a scant nine years earlier Life magazine had pictured actress Donna Reed wading, was, to use a cliché, a raging torrent, as much as six feet deep. In the building boom of the early 1950s, it seems not too much thought had been given to the consequences of building houses close to streams. Back in the heyday of prunes and apricots, it was no big deal when a creek overflowed its banks and covered an orchard. Fill the same area with houses, though, and you have the makings of a problem, some of which Saratoga had.
Similarly, homebuilders learned hard lessons about putting houses on landfill scooped out from a hillside. Needless to say, the lessons were passed on to the homebuyers.
The creek problem was exacerbated by a situation near the old county gravel quarry, then located up Highway 9 shortly before Pierce Road. Here a quantity of gravel had been piled up adjacent to the creek, and when the flooding occurred, this washed into the main flow, effectively raising the level of the streambed.
This and the downstream flooding of several houses set the Santa Clara Valley Water Conservation District off on a channel-gouging binge that lasted for years. For my money (your tax dollars at work), this was a case of overkill, at least on the section of creek going through my property, but that's another story, if not column.
One interesting sidelight to the flood story was the role of recently completed Lexington Dam. This massive, earth-fill structure alongside Highway 17 had been a controversial project almost from the beginning. It was strongly opposed by many in Los Gatos, who feared the town would be virtually wiped out if the dam ever broke. But when a test came, the dam not only withstood the forces of nature but, as was reportedly said by San Jose City Manager A.P. "Dutch" Hamann, it saved that city's downtown. This makes sense when you look at San Jose's geography. Los Gatos Creek and the Guadalupe River come to a confluence between Santa Clara and Julian streets. The latter's flow was curtailed to an extent by Guadalupe Reservoir several miles upstream. Had Los Gatos Creek's flow not been similarly curtailed by Lexington Dam, the results could have been disastrous.
My own recollections of the flooding are highlighted by the situation in Santa Cruz at the height of the crisis. As a reporter for the San Jose Mercury, I was assigned to check out the situation on the other side of the hill. Bill Regan, chief photographer for the Mercury and News (they were two publications back then), and I went over in his car. There were no lights, it was as black as the inside of a cow, and I remember us as being in the only car on Highway 17. In blacked-out Santa Cruz, we found an emergency shelter in a school gymnasium, and I was able to put together a story from the refugees.
I still have a memento of the Santa Cruz flood. A few years later, I bought some type from a defunct job-printing shop that had been located on Pacific Avenue. The silt from the floodwaters could still be seen in the interstices of letters like "o" and "d."
It's still bright and sunny outside; I'm wondering if we'll ever see rain again.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
