bjgreen
(Photo of the 1914 flood courtesy of the Santa Barbara Public Library)
By Betsy J. Green
The worries about the consequences of too much rain began long before the January 2018 cloudburst that devastated parts of Montecito. An article in the local paper in August 1918, sounded a cautionary note about excessive vegetation in the canyons above the settled areas of Santa Barbara.
“Since the last great storm of January [1914], there has been a great growth of such trees as alders and willows in the canyon beds, and it is just such a growth that catches the debris in a flood, impounding a vast amount of water, only to break and precipitate it through the nearest valley district … Some of the old Spanish people used to call attention to this condition, but the more recent arrivals in the valley paid no attention to the warning until it was too late. The only way to obviate the danger is a systematic clearing out of such growth in the canyon beds.”
(There’s more information and photos about the record-breaking flood of Mission Creek in “Way Back When: Santa Barbara in 1914.”)
My next Way Back When book — 1918 — will be available in local bookstores in November, and at Amazon.com. This will be the fifth book in my series of the history of Santa Barbara, one year at a time.
Learn more about me at my website:
no way it happened BEFORE! its almost like nature has its own plan.
Nature ALWAYS wins. Climate change? Massive geological evidence shows it happened 6 times before, and Earth’s still here . The last biggie, 7 million years ago, wiped out 95% of all things living at the time but Earth’s still here. Homo Sapiens (that’s us) have been around 200 -300 thousand years, most of it pretty hand-to-mouth. Mama Nature’s been adapting to us rather than other-way-around for most of that. We’ve been gaining on her most noticeably since around the Industrial Revolution, increasingly since about 1900, massively in the last 50 years. But don’t worry about about Earth. Mama Nature will adapt. Us? Well, there’s always some breakage in these turn-overs. That’s why they’re called Mass Extinctions.
“Nature” does not plan. Nature is just like a boulder rolling downhill and being bounced and deflected along the way. When it ends up somewhere it is absurd to say it planned to be there. Nature is not sentient. Nature has no moral judgment. Nature is incapable of considering our thoughts much less our prayers. We are an accident of chance and, as noted above, only a recent phenomenon. On other hand we can plan and take steps to avoid “nature”. So in the final analysis we are more like a god to nature than nature is a god to us.
Typo: That’s 74 M years ago not 7 M. Didn’t hit the “4” hard enough, I guess. BTW–what’s with a down vote on non-abusive, non-obscene, straight scientific information? Does someone not understand irony?