I See by the Papers...

The "Diablo Winds" are apparently a Regular Thing now, with the high, dry northeasterly gales ripping through the North Bay and too often creating firestorms. But how common were these damned winds historically?

Start with our three examples that caused major fires: The 2017 Tubbs Fire, the forgotten Great Fire of 1870 and the 1964 Hanly Fire. Beyond those incidents, however, it's hard to say with much certainty.

First, "Diablo Winds" is a modern term, invented in 1991 (Wikipedia has a good explanation of the meteorology), so looking for that name in the old newspapers is a non-starter. A century ago and more they may have sometimes called it “Boreas,” although that was the classical name for a cold north wind often accompanied by rains. But the bigger problem is that our ancestors didn't care much about recording wind speeds; while they diligently kept records of rainfall down to the hundredth of an inch, apparently no one in Sonoma County had an anemometer in the old days.

Searches of the Santa Rosa and Healdsburg newspapers turned up surprisingly few historic windstorms that match the Diablo pattern with certainty (I limited my research to autumn and early winter storms with no rain mentioned). If I find more I'll add it here and flag the update in the title of this article. Sources of all newspaper items are transcribed below. But I think it's safe to presume these big winds weren't very common.

The most surprising discovery was 1871, the year following the Great Fire. Once again there were "large fires were seen in the direction of Napa and Sonoma, and it is feared serious damage was done in those localities."




The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott