Bill Lynch: Valley storm barrages are nothing new – in fact they’re expected

Valley storm barrages are nothing new – in fact, they're expected|

In between periods of drought Sonoma Valley has always had its bouts with dramatic winter rainstorms not unlike what we’ve seen this season.

Ask any old-timer in town to compare this year with previous wet years and you are likely to get a variety of tales about the worst one ever, and they go back for decades.

If I had to choose I’d say it was the storm of February 1986. That storm was a killer.

It began on Feb. 13 and in just a week, dropped more than 20 inches of rain in the upper reaches of the Valley.

Rain gauges literally overflowed. Residents had to flee their homes, and two Kenwood youths drowned after their inflatable boat capsized in the raging flood currents of Sonoma Creek near Kenwood.

In Glen Ellen residents in the O’Donnell-Robertson Road areas were evacuated. In the southern part of Sonoma Valley, rising waters trapped a school bus full of students who had to be rescued by the CHP.

Waters rose rapidly in Schellville, which isn’t unusual, but this time they covered more than 6,000 acres. In some areas the water was more than six feet deep and several ranchers lost cattle to drowning.

Highway 121 and 12 were closed for days, and schools had to be closed as well. Portions of roads along Sonoma Creek in El Verano and Boyes Hot Springs slid into the creek, and many creek side residents lost property and buildings.

Trees and power lines were down all over town.

Landslides closed Highway 121 at Napa Road.

President Reagan declared Sonoma County a disaster.

The small news staff of the Index-Tribune spent so much time wading in the storm reporting and taking photos of flood damage that some of us believed we were growing webs between our toes.

Not for the first time in local flood history some local residents with small boats were said to be using them to row down city streets to run their errands rather than risk getting their cars stuck in the flooded intersections.

Several days into the deluge I recall receiving a frantic call from a local retail merchant who had a store on the east side of the 500 block of Broadway who said the back of her store was floating away.

I waded across Broadway and down the sidewalk to her little dress shop in an old wooden store.

While the front of her shop was dry, the rear portion looked to be part of a flowing creek. Boxes of her merchandise were floating away.

The old building had apparently built over a former creek bed, which ran directly under the rear portion of the store. The winter stream was running probably exactly as it had for centuries before old Sonoma was developed.

Fortunately for most Sonomans local flooding recedes rapidly once the rains stop. The land on which most of us live slopes sharply toward the bay, meaning most excess water flows that direction.

Schellville on the other hand, is just about at sea level, and the storm of 1986 turned it into a lake that stayed around for many weeks after the rains had stopped.

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