Worse Than the Big One—California’s Looming Megaflood

Sacramento, January 1862, USGS

Intense rainstorms began to pound central California on Christmas Eve, 1861, and continued nonstop for 43 days, converting the rivers that flow from the Sierra Nevada into torrents that flooded the Central Valley. Entire communities were swept away. Sacramento was under water for the next six months, forcing the state government to be relocated to San Francisco. The Central Valley became an inland sea that was 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. Thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of cows were killed. The state was bankrupted by the disaster. (From Scientific American, “Megastorms Could Drown Portions of California.”)

Sounds cataclysmic and it was, but new evidence indicates that storms like this have occurred roughly every 200 years in California, many far more intense than the one in 1861. A megaflood in 1605 is estimated to have been 50% worse than any of the others, including the one in 1861. These megastorms are caused by Atmospheric Rivers, thin belts of water vapor that hover about a mile above the Earth’s surface, extending thousands of miles over the sea. They originate in the tropics and carry as much water as 10 Mississippi Rivers. While the megastorms occur relatively infrequently, weaker atmospheric rivers hit the California coast yearly and, for the past 50 years, have produced 30-50% of the state’s rain and snow in just 10 days each year.

Hypothetical Flooding From Megastorm, USGS

According to Scientific American, climate models suggest that global warming will increase the number of atmospheric rivers hitting California each year and they will carry more water than previous ones, increasing the frequency and intensity of megastorms. At the same time, the state’s population is far higher than it was in 1861. Hundreds of communities and large cities now exist in the Central Valley, with a combined population of 6 million people. The Sacramento area alone is home to more than 1 million people, while Fresno has over 500,000 people. The Central Valley is also one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world, producing about $20 billion in crops annually. A model projecting the effects of an atmospheric river lasting only 23 days found there would be more than $700 billion in damage to property, business and agriculture. It would also likely lead to food shortages.

Atmospheric rivers also bring devastation to other west coasts and even some inland regions. Nashville’s flooding in 2010 (30 deaths, $2 billion in damage) was due to an atmospheric river. There was substantial damage to England and Spain from atmospheric rivers in 2009. Last month, Wales and England experienced their worst flooding in 50 years. Other regions susceptible to megaflooding from atmospheric rivers include Chile, Namibia and Western Australia.

Ironically, while Californians are hypersensitive to the risks of earthquakes and the state regularly prepares contingencies and practices emergency procedures for earthquakes, virtually nothing is being done to protect the state from megafloods, which would be roughly three times more costly than a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hitting the state’s populous south. The state’s levees, for example, are in deplorable condition and could be damaged by much milder storms, risking the inundation of croplands with sea water. At the same time, while earthquakes cannot be predicted, an atmospheric river can be seen coming days in advance and NOAA is now monitoring them very closely.

Gay Agenda: Taking Over The Planet One Earthquake At A Time

The publisher of the conservative website WorldNetDaily is blaming Tuesday’s East Coast earthquake on the nation’s declining morals, saying that "Washington, D.C., deserves more than the wallop it got today. It needs a much bigger shaking up than it got." (See Democracy Now for details). In other words, God was sending a warning. Cut out all the abortions and queer behavior or He’s gonna git you!

It is not just Christian conservatives who believe such nonsense. Brooklyn rabbi Yehuda Levin recorded a YouTube video blaming the earthquake on the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage. According to Levin,"The Jerusalem Talmud tells us that one of the reasons that God brings earthquakes to the world is because of the transgression of homosexuality. And the Talmud states, 'You have shaken your male member in a place where it does not belong. I, too, will shake the Earth.'

Nuke Hysteria: U.S. Threatened By Its Own Plants

It will probably be a while before we know how bad the Japanese nuclear disaster really is, and even longer before we know how much the fallout will affect people in the U.S. According to the experts, the effects in California should be negligible.

Maybe they are right. After all, the affects of Chernobyl were small beyond 1,500 miles, and Japan is several thousand miles away from California. However, as a father of a three-year old, I am very concerned. Children in Scandinavia did have an elevated risk of birth defects and developmental damage as a result of Chernobyl and the Japanese disaster will certainly increase background radiation levels. But what concerns me much more than this and what should really concern Americans is not the fallout from Japan, but the risks of our own nuclear industry, which has had dozens of near crises and is equally susceptible to severe earthquake damage.

The California plants in San Onofre and Diablo Canyon were built to withstand earthquakes of 7.0 and 7.5, respectively, according to SFGate. But California is known to have had quakes in excess of 8.0. Furthermore, both nuclear plants are on the coast, making them susceptible to tsunami damage. According to the Huffington Post, Diablo Canyon is less than 1 mile from an offshore earthquake fault. The Cascadian subduction zone is thought to be able to generate quakes in the 9.0 range, along with cataclysmic tsunamis. It did, in fact, cause a tsunami that devastated what is now Humboldt County in 1700. Furthermore, the San Onofre plant sits less than 100 miles from San Diego and Los Angeles, with a total population of well of 10 million in the near vicinity. Then there is the additional threat of the rising sea levels and increasingly violent storms accompanying climate change.

It is not just California that is at risk. Regulators have known for six years that the nuclear plants in the central and eastern U.S. are at far greater earthquake risk than previously assumed. The New Madrid fault in Missouri, for example, has had quakes in the 19^th century that are thought to have surpassed 8.0 on the Richter scale. In 1986, a quake in Cleveland damaged the Perry Nuclear Power Plant, according to a report in Common Dreams. Also, a recently discovered fault runs beneath the Indian Point plant less than 50 miles from New York City, making it arguably the most dangerous nuclear power plant in the country.

Compounding the earthquake risk is years of lax regulation and maintenance. Democracy Now reported that the backup diesel generators at the Fermi 2 reactor in Michigan were inoperable for 20 years. Had there been a disaster in that plant, there would have been no backup energy and potential disaster for Toledo and Windsor. Likewise, the Palisades reactor in Michigan has been storing radioactive waste in silos along Lake Michigan since 1993, in violation of NRC regulations, putting at risk the drinking water of millions of people. There are also dozens of nuclear power plants in operation in the U.S. with obsolete containment systems that could fail in an accident. In 1985, the NRC warned of this risk, saying plants like Dresden, in Illinois, or Vermont Yankee, had a 90% chance of failure in a severe accident.

Compounding the risk even further still are the woefully inadequate and ill-conceived general disaster-preparedness plans in the U.S. For example, there are only evacuation plans for 10 miles around U.S. plants, yet the U.S. is insisting on evacuating U.S. citizens within 50 miles of the Japanese plants. Even this could be inadequate. A one-hundred square mile zone around Chernobyl is now uninhabitable it is so radioactive. Should one of the U.S. plants go level 6 or level 7, particularly near a densely populated region such as Indian Point or San Onofre, it might be impossible to quickly evacuate everyone within 50 miles, let alone 100. Also, in light of the pathetic U.S. response to hurricane Katrina, it is hard to believe that the government is in any shape to deal with a disaster of the magnitude of the one unfolding in Japan.

Hopefully the current hysteria around nukes, whether misplaced or well-founded, will reinvigorate the anti-nuclear movement and inspire mass protests like we saw in the 1980s and we are currently seeing in Europe. Ralph Nader seems to think the move to increase nuclear power in the U.S. is temporarily dead in the water. However, Obama has asserted that the Japanese disaster will have no effect on U.S. plans to increase its nuclear power plants. He made true on similar threats in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, okaying deepwater oil exploration less than a year after, so there is no reason to think he won’t continue to push nukes, too, unless the anti-nuclear movement grows rapidly in size and militancy.