This past February, the Santa Barbara Airport closed twice due to flooding from incessant rainstorms. The year before it closed in January when powerful storms driven by atmospheric rivers of rain dropped more than 10 inches along the coast and 33 inches in the mountains. Barely 15 feet above sea level — the Pacific Ocean is just a few hundred yards away — the airport is bordered by the Goleta Slough and three creek systems. Given its vulnerability to sea level rise, the airport is currently planning for the effects an increase of up to 6.6 feet, and the public is invited to take part.
The 950 acres that contain the airport are no stranger to flooding. In fact, the neighboring Goleta Slough was born out of a winter that brought Biblical levels of rainfall. What had been a bay deep enough to draft small ships on Christmas Eve in 1861 came to be filled with the gravel and sand that swept from the mountains during a near-continuous rainstorm that lasted until February 5, 1862. Historians called it the Noachian deluge, Larry Gurrola wrote in a report titled “ Fire, Flood, and Landslide Dam History ” (2022). The storms dropped 50 inches of rain in Santa Barbara, clearing the soil out of the orchards, Gurrola wrote. Flooding from mountain creeks “permanently changed the 36 landscape and creek channel locations of Santa Barbara County.”
This past March, a study of core samples from the Carrizo Plain showed that even larger episodes of flooding had occurred sometime between 1470 and 1640, and again at some point between 1740 and 1800. Though the 1862 floods were large enough to create an inland sea 300 miles long in the Central Valley, the study published in the Journal of Paleolimnology did not find sediment from those floods in the core sample. As reported by the Los Angeles Times in June, this suggested that 1862 was a significantly smaller flood than the other two events.
