GREAT FLOODS IN CALIFORNIA.

Patea Mail, 17 March 1881, Page 3

GREAT FLOODS IN CALIFORNIA.

Recent newspapers from California give full accounts of the inundations prevailing in the great Sacramento valley. The City of Sacramento was in some danger. The water had risen higher than was ever known before, and measured 2G feet at the levee or barricade which had been erected above the city after the disastrous floods of 18011802, when the whole city was submerged, and boats were plying through all the principal streets, the boatmen demanding fabulous sums for rescuing valuable property from peril, Marysville, which was overflowed about eight years ago, has been also threatened, and several small villages have been inundated. The coach from Marysville to Colusa was overtaken by the rushing waters: two of the horses were drowned, and the passengers were saved only by a boat coming to their rescue. Looking westward from the roof of Cridley railway station, there appeared to be a great inland sea thirty miles wide, covering the fertile valley, where terrible damage lias been suffered among farms and orchards, live stock and growing grain crops. These periodical inundations arise from the rivers leading from the great Sierra Nevada mountain range being filled up with soil washed into them by the gold miners higher up, and overflow their banks on reaching the almost level plains ■which lie between the mountains and the sea. It has even been suggested that mining operations should be prohibited, to prevent the recurrence of

these disasters, but the natural action of the rivers would produce the same difficulty, although less rapidly. Engineers will have to be invoked to devise some scheme to prevent the fertile Sacramento valley being overllowed and graduallyconverted, when the waters subside, into an immense arid and valueless gravel bed.