California Storms Mark Wettest Three Weeks in Bay Area Since Abraham Lincoln Was President

The San Francisco Bay Area has experienced the wettest three-week period since Abraham Lincoln was president during the Great Flood of 1862 — and the winter isn’t over yet.

The San Jose Mercury News reported Tuesday:

New rainfall totals show that no person alive has ever experienced a three-week period as wet as the past three weeks were in the Bay Area. The last time it happened, Abraham Lincoln was president.

From Dec. 26 to Jan. 15, a total of 17 inches of rain fell in downtown San Francisco. That’s the second-wettest three-week period at any time in San Francisco’s recorded history, since daily records began in 1849 during the Gold Rush. And it’s more than five times the city’s historical average of 3.1 inches over the same time.

The only three-week period that was wetter in San Francisco — which is often used as the benchmark for Bay Area weather because it has the oldest records — came during the Civil War, when a drowning 23.01 inches fell from Jan. 5 to Jan. 25, 1862 during a landmark winter that became known as “The Great Flood of 1862.”

The Great Flood of 1862 inundated the Central Valley and flooded the state’s capital city of Sacramento, just twelve years after California had been admitted to the Union as a free state. It led to a drive to build dams, levees, and other infrastructure that would control flooding.

Though California rarely floods that heavily, it typically experiences dry summers and wet winters, with periods of drought and occasionally intense rainfall.

Activists and journalists have already tried to argue that the recent rainy period reflects the impact of “climate change” — both in the severity of the rain and in the unpredictability of the weather. (Forecasters had predicted a dry La Niña winter, the third in a row.)

However, scientists have not yet confirmed whether the ongoing drought or the rains are the result of climate change, or are natural patterns that could become more intense in future.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.