"We've Lost Everything"

Winter is the wet season in Northern California, but this time the rain and snow just would not stop. For nine days a series of storms lashed the area and caused floods, mudslides and avalanches from the coast to Colorado. By the time the clouds began to part late last week, the area's wettest weather in more than 30 years had left at least 18 dead and forced nearly 35,000 people to flee their homes.

The trouble started when the jet stream, which usually carries water-laden air from the Gulf of Alaska toward Canada, dipped south toward Hawaii, then headed for the coast with a burden of subtropical moisture. Like a conveyor belt gone haywire, it pitched one storm after another across the beleaguered West. In Northern California, 32,000 people were evacuated, more than 7,000 homes damaged or destroyed, and thousands of acres of farmland flooded, including some of the Napa Valley vineyards.

North of San Francisco, the Russian River rose to inundate the surrounding resorts and country houses as well as the tiny town of Guerneville. Said Guerneville Resident Mary Cervantes: "We've lost everything." Spreading out from California, the storms cut a haphazard trail of havoc. Mudslides that cut the main auto routes through the High Sierras stranded thousands of gamblers in Reno. In Utah rain deluged the low-lying areas and snows blanketed the mountains.

Even as the rains were tapering off, there were new miseries in Northern California, where as many as 22,000 people were evacuated when a levee on the Yuba River suddenly burst. By week's end worried officials in areas north of San Francisco were casting a nervous eye on brimming reservoirs. All of which has left Donald Neudeck, California's chief of flood operations, marveling at nature's sometimes grim capriciousness. "A little over a week ago," he says, "we were in the throes of a drought."