There are two accounts of the two-day storm in 1892 rain was mentioned in Petaluma but not elsewhere. “Those who witnessed the disaster say the sides and interior of the building seemed to melt away before the blast and the roof pausing in mid air a moment like a hawk hovering above its prey, fell with a crash that was heard for miles.” “A vicious wind” in 1887, which might also have been a freak tornado, took down a two-story hotel at Los Guilucos that was under construction. Once again there were “large fires were seen in the direction of Napa and Sonoma…It was the hardest blow ever experienced in this locality.” The most surprising discovery was 1871, the year following the Great Fire. Sources of all newspaper items are transcribed below.

If I find more I’ll add it here and flag the update in the title of this article, but I think it’s safe to presume these big winds weren’t very common. 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 destructive weather events during the California autumn months with no rain mentioned). But the bigger problem is that our ancestors didn’t care much about recording wind directions or 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. A century ago and more they sometimes called any bad winds “Boreas,” although that was the classical name for a cold north wind often accompanied by rains. Beyond those incidents, however, it’s hard to say with much certainty.įirst, “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. Start with our three examples that caused major fires: The 2017 Tubbs Fire, the forgotten Great Fire of 1870 and the 1964 Hanly Fire. But how common were these damned winds historically?

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.

Rain totals today in santa rosa ca