Drenching Spring

Spring came to California in belting, pounding, soaking storms. They swept out of the icy land mass of Siberia, gathered fury and moisture over the Pacific, homed east and southeast along the jet stream, roared in around Marin County's Mt. Tamalpais in 100-m.p.h. gusts. In the first 3 1/2 days of April, San Francisco got 3.96 in. of rain. Normal rainfall for all of April: 1.49 in. Rain cascaded down the city's spectacular slopes, spilled knee-deep into downtown streets. On residential Mt. Sutro a strange sea of mud 100 ft. long and 25 ft. deep seeped toward a couple of apartment houses. In the tidelands community of Alviso, almost all of the 1,000 residents evacuated their homes before 4-to-8-ft. floods. Against four miles of coastline near Rockaway Beach, the ocean battered in mighty 40-ft. breakers.

Spring swept on across the state, wrenching at homes, uprooting trees, blocking highways and railroads, swelling rivers and streams' and sogging levees to wrap up Northern California's wettest winter since 1890. In the majestic High Sierra the storms piled new snow into 20-ft. drifts, marooned 1,000 vacationers in ski lodges and Nevada state line gambling clubs, bogged transcontinental trucks straining across Donner Pass, treated 97 passengers aboard Southern Pacific's crack streamliner City of San Francisco to 30 hours of well-fed isolation in a snowbound snowshed near the pass.

In the irrigated Central Valley, spring soaked apricot trees, vineyards, alfalfa stands, tomato rows and the hopes of thousands of farmers. Sample casualty: the cotton grower, afraid that he would not be able to work his fields before the normal May 10 planting deadline; to work them later would mean the risk of bad weather during the fall picking season, lower-grade cotton, lower prices. Cotton was a $250 million crop in the valley last year.

Spring pounded, too, at Southern California, already beset and embarrassed by its own wettest winter in six years. Recurrent slides of rain-soaked earth dumped 500,000 tons of rubble on to U.S. Highway loiA, west of Los Angeles, killed the district highway superintendent, rolled over and buried dozens of trucks, left two blocks of fashionable Pacific Palisades homes perilously close to the edge. The Mojave Desert's Mojave River, known as "UpsideDown River" because all but a trickle of its flow is underground, rose to near-flood dimensions near Barstow.

Near week's end President Eisenhower, surveying storm's results--twelve deaths, 5,000 people doused out of their homes, flash-estimate damage of $12 million to $100 million--declared California a federal disaster area.

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