December 1964, 35 inches of rain!

     For the first time in many years, all the water reservoirs in the state of California are full, and the snow pack in the mountains is deep. The month of March had the steady, prolonged type of rain the ranchers like, the kind that soaks in deeply and keeps the springs running all summer. Sadly, some people have paid a heavy price for all of this glorious moisture. Houses and roads are slipping slowly into the canyons. Nobody is really to blame, Mother Nature is a bitch.
     It is especially sad to me to see someone lose their valuable possessions. I’ve seen that devastation many times at house fires. I’ve always thought that it was strange when a hurricane or a major flood destroys a bunch of houses, FEMA or some other governmental agency steps in a provides new housing for them. But, if ONE house burns or slides down the canyon they just look at it like it was a small loss, and not do a thing. Let me tell you folks… when you lose everything, you loose everything. It doesn’t matter how many other people lost everything, it only matters that YOUR family is doing without.
     After putting everything in context, it seem like a good time to talk about December 1964, where a good percentage of people lost everything to a major rainfall. There was a slide similar to the dean creek slide at least every five miles. Most of the bridges and roadways were also washed out. Not just in Humboldt County, but all over northern California. I won’t even try to describe it because people can’t picture it in their minds. Even when they can picture how bad it was they start trying to lay blame. Like it was caused by ranching, logging, road-building or some other fault of man, but it wasn’t that it just rained incredibly hard.
     How hard, you say? Well there was 35 inches of rain in December, the first part of which collected as snow, about 1 foot deep in the Valleys like Laytonville and Branscomb. And about 3 feet deep on Bell Springs ridge, and about 4 feet in Kettenpom. The rain then turned warm and started raining like a thundershower. In the last five days it rained 27.5 inches. The snow melted with the torrential rain. “In the last 4 hours of the heavy rain, it rained 7 inches, and in one of those last hours it rained 4 inches.”
I not telling you this to belittle the loss of the people today, but this is one of the rare opportunities that I’ve ever had to try to convey to people how hard it rained in 1964.