The Truckee River and the Flood of Ninety-Seven

The Truckee River runs through the center of Reno the way a spine runs through a body, structurally necessary, occasionally problematic, always present. It rises from Lake Tahoe, drops through the Sierra Nevada gorges, enters the Truckee Meadows at Reno, and continues northeast another hundred miles to Pyramid Lake. For most of the year it is a pleasant, walkable river. Every decade or so, it reminds the city what it actually is.

The flood record goes back to eighteen sixty-one. Major inundations struck in eighteen sixty-two, eighteen sixty-seven, eighteen eighty-six, nineteen twenty-eight, and nineteen fifty. Then came New Year's Day, nineteen ninety-seven.

A series of unusually warm winter storms hit the Sierra Nevada in late December of nineteen ninety-six, a phenomenon meteorologists call an atmospheric river, sometimes named the Pineapple Express for the moisture it pulls from near the Hawaiian Islands. The warm rain melted a deep snowpack faster than the terrain could absorb it. Water poured into the Truckee from every drainage basin in the northern Sierra.

The Truckee River reached flood stage in Sparks at two in the morning on January first. By ten-thirty that morning it had reached flood stage in Reno. It crested at fourteen-point-seven feet on January second, breaking the previous record of thirteen-point-eight set in nineteen fifty. The river poured into downtown streets. Several casinos took on water. Four feet of floodwater stood in some Reno roadways. Reno-Tahoe International Airport closed on January second, stranding a thousand tourists. The east-west runway alone required thirty-three million dollars in repair work. Damage across the region reached four hundred and fifty million dollars.

Two people died in Washoe County. The Truckee River came back within its banks. And the city began, again, the slow work of reckoning with what it had built beside a river that will always do what rivers do.