Hurricane Hilary is underway but has a hurricane ever hit Sacramento? Here’s what we know
Ever wondered if there has been an actual hurricane in Sacramento?
Well, a letter published in a February 1938 edition of Nebraska’s The Columbus Daily Telegram details how a hurricane devastated California’s capital city. The letter was penned by Bernard Cuba, “a former Columbus boy” who had moved to Sacramento and decided to report the weather event to his hometown newspaper.
Cuba noted that as “one of the easterners” he had experienced his share of extreme weather but on Feb. 9 he had watched “a lovely city noted for it’s beautiful trees and landscape swept to pathetic shambles and leaving a scar that will remain for years to come. I watched Sacramento take a beating from a hurricane.”
A quick Google search turned up no other mention of this hurricane. Strange, right?
We reached out to the National Weather Service to find out if a hurricane had hit Sacramento in 1938.
So what actually happened?
“Hurricanes in winter just don’t happen,” said Scott Rowe, a National Service meteorologist, when The Bee asked him about the 1938 storm.
“My inclination is that because it is February it would be a winter storm,” Rowe said. “It would not be a hurricane. I can guarantee you it was not a tropical hurricane at that point in time in February of 1938.”
The Bee’s 1938 article did refer to the storm as a gale, which also causes some confusion, but according to Rowe newspapers often referred to winds as gales.
“Gales are under the Beaufort scale and are an old school way of referencing winds,” Rowe said.
The Beaufort scale is a measure of wind speed. A gale, according to the National Weather Service is “an extratropical low or an area of sustained surface of 39 to 54 miles per hour.”
Reports from 1938 Sacramento ‘hurricane’
Sacramento was met with “two hours of hell” on Feb. 9, according the 1938 Daily Telegram article, after 11 days of consecutive rain drenched the capital city.
Winds of up to 60 miles per hour hit the capital causing trees to topple over. The scenes that Cuba described are reminiscent of the winter storms that drenched the capital earlier this year.
While Cuba took liberties in categorizing the to storm as a hurricane, he anticipated blowback from his California contemporaries. “I may be sued by the California Chamber of Commerce for my relating weather conditions here,” Cuba wrote. “But Californians have stuck many a low blow at the Midwest farmers who have come here because of the dust storms and now I feel that I might have the right opportunity to strike back.”
The Sacramento Bee also reported that the “gale” left three dead and caused a “huge property loss.”
California and hurricanes
Warm ocean water is needed to produce and sustain a hurricane, Rowe said, which makes them very different than the winter storms during California’s wet season.
“It’s very unusual that we get them out here so it’s not often we have the opportunity to discuss hurricanes,” Rowe said.
While Hurricane Hilary is underway “it’s not forecast to impact California as a hurricane”, Rowe said. “Currently the forecast is there’s a tropical storm watch for Southern California.”
Right now it is a major hurricane, Rowe said, but it’s still a long ways off from the coast of California.
The most Sacramento can anticipate as Hurricane Hilary approaches is “a few muggy, humid days, Rowe said in a Wednesday article from The Bee.
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