CALIFORNIA is due a mega-storm that could drown towns and cities in up to 20 metres of water at any moment.
Experts are preparing for freak weather so severe that it could open up a 300-mile-long ocean across the Golden State.
They say deposits in California’s soil show the state is hit by extreme flooding once every 200 years.
The effects could reach the severity of “big San Andreas earthquakes”, according to one US Geological Survey researcher.
In centuries past, floodwaters have turned California’s Central Valley into an inland sea.
One 19th Century disaster swept away entire towns following 45 days of non-stop torrential rain.
Triggered by an atmospheric river, a large concentration of water vapour, the 1861 storm is among the worst in the state’s history.
Rivers running down the Sierra Nevada mountains turned into deadly torrents.
The city of Sacramento was drowned in up to 10ft of brown, debris-filled water. It was so high residents had to row up to second-storey windows to enter their homes.
The flooding “bankrupted the state, destroyed the ranching industry and drowned 200,000 head of cattle,” Lucy Jones, an expert at the US Geological Survey, told NPR in 2013.
California's 19th Century Mega-Flood – key figures
Here's everything you need to know...
- California was hit by a massive storm from late 1961-1862
- The Golden State saw non-stop rain for 45 days
- The Central Valley of California became an inland sea 300 miles long
- The Sacramento River reached a level of 22 feet, 7 inches above flood level
- This left Sacramento under up to 10ft of water
- An estimated 200,000 of the state’s 800,000 cattle drowned
Jones warned that the catastrophic storm of 1861 wasn’t a one off.
“We have geological evidence through flood deposits that even bigger storms than 1861 happened about once every 300 years. We have six events in 1,800 years of geological record,” Jones said on the USGS’s CoreCast podcast in 2011.
“So we think this event happens, you know, once every hundred, 200 years or so, which puts it in the category as our big San Andreas earthquakes.”
Extreme floods can cause as much destruction as a hurricane, according to Jones.
“[These storms] have the potential of hurricanes – or even more so because they go on for weeks,” she told NPR.
According to a recent USGS analysis, a storm of 1861’s severity lasting 23 days has the same annual likelihood of occurring as a 7.8 magnitude earthquake.
Floods caused by the outbreak would result in three times the loss in damage, at around £580billion.
There’s currently no evidence a mega-storm will hit California in the immediate future.
While the effects would be devastating, due to modern dams and flood control systems, they would not be as severe as they were 150 years ago.
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