Tuesday February 21, 2023
Wired —
On the surface, the Salinas River, which courses through the agricultural heart of California’s Central Coast, seems more like an ex-river. Even after major winter storms, it is rarely more than a creek. In Paso Robles, California, an old Spanish outpost that has since become a wine-growing mecca, the mostly dry riverbed cuts through an unprepossessing stretch of land surrounded by heaps of garbage and makeshift structures built by the city’s growing unhoused population.
And yet a closer look reveals signs of flood—scoured river stones, logs rolled smooth, and clamshell fossils embedded in limestone from the uplands of the Temblor and Coast ranges. Only a river capable of occasional ferocity could have created this underlying landscape.
This winter, the Salinas reminded us of that fury. A series of atmospheric river storms transformed the Salinas River into a torrent. Fed by precipitation that, over the course of one month, dropped an estimated 30 trillion gallons across the state, the Salinas swelled to become, briefly, one of the largest rivers in the state. On the outskirts of Monterey, near the tiny farming town of Chualar, the river excavated a hole in a levee and poured floodwater into the surrounding fields. On San Marcos Creek, a typically dry tributary, a 5-year-old boy was swept from a car and into the torrent. His body has not yet been found. So extreme was the flooding that water experts feared a repeat of the flood of 1995, when the Salinas overtopped its banks and created a moat around the city of Monterey, temporarily turning the peninsula into an island and isolating it from the rest of California.