Download Sea Cliffs, Beaches, and Coastal Valleys of San Diego by Gerald G. Kuhn PDF

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Meantime in southern California, we noticed that our usual spring fogginess was absent. As the season advanced, the weather, rather than growing warmer in the summer months, was actually growing colder. Heating bills were higher during June than they had been in the middle of the preceding winter. As the summer months continued, floods developed in many areas. The Plains states in the upper Mississippi Valley were flooded, putting much of the grain-growing area under water, and causing crop losses.

According to our hypothesis, this period would Page 23 be expected to show considerable effects from volcanic activity. Following the last of the major eruptions, however, there was a considerable delay in any notable weather changes. The weather was warm and seasonable for a period of a year and a half after the eruption. Then the weather changed drastically for a period of at least one year. The volcanic eruptions actually continued until 1892, but curiously the period in which we have what might be called volcanic weather started in the midst of this volcanic outburst, approximately the first of January, 1890.

Everything was swept before it. Enough wood was crushed up by this torrent to give us firewood for years. The once thickly wooded glen is swept bare as a sandy beach on the ocean shore. Every tree, shrub and branch is gone. It is absolutely desolate. " As of 1 April 1884, the California Southern Railroad, which had begun operations between San Diego and San Bernardino only a year earlier, declared bankruptcy on account of the storms and the flooding. By the second week of June, the city of San Diego had measured twenty-five inches of rain, and fifty to eighty inches had fallen in other parts of San Diego County, but the rains began to lessen.