![]() That’s due to the construction of San Antonio Dam, which opened - or should that be closed? - in 1956, and other flood control improvements. called the period “the worst weather-related disaster in California in the 20th century.” Its article said 91 people died in Southern California, including the brother of future Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan.īad as the floods were, they weren’t as bad as the flood of 1938, when some 250 are believed to have perished. The storms were not just local: 35 of 58 California counties were declared disaster areas. More evacuations took place in Cucamonga and Upland. The father, who was a short distance away, saw the scene, suffered a heart attack and died too. A portion of then-Highway 60 that had been repaired was washed out again.Ī landslide in Mount Baldy crushed a house, killing three children. That is, until rain started falling again for four days starting Feb. San Bernardino and Riverside counties were declared federal disaster areas. His daughter, Antonia, quietly drew with crayons.Ī station wagon trying to evade a barricade on Base Line Road where it crossed the Cucamonga Wash was swept over a 25-foot drop into the wash and its driver was reported dead.Īt Foothill and Vineyard, both the landmark Thomas Winery and the Kapu-Kai restaurant and bowling alley were inundated. In the cafeteria, Hugo Becerra was barefoot and worrying about their neighbors. The couple had a harrowing departure from their Hellman Avenue home, pulling themselves and their daughter, 6, hand-over-hand along a rope through raging floodwaters to waiting sheriff’s deputies. The Becerra family’s plight was noted in the Report. Some 75 evacuees “numbed by cold, drenched by unrelenting rains and left homeless by seas of mud and flood waters” spent the night in the Cucamonga Elementary School cafeteria. Residents had to flee after water flowed up to 3 feet deep in their living rooms. ![]() A man runs past a station wagon that was washed two blocks down Carnelian Avenue, along with part of the road surface. When the Cucamonga Creek channel overflowed over a wide swath near Foothill Boulevard and Vineyard Avenue, water covered a wide plain from Vineyard east to Hellman Avenue, from Foothill south as far as 6th Street. Most of the misery was concentrated in the future Rancho Cucamonga. Some 400 refugees milled around the gymnasium at Upland High after a meal in the cafeteria. Residents of the Foothill Knolls neighborhood of Upland were sent to evacuation centers at local schools. “From Mount Baldy and Alta Loma in the north, all the way south along Cucamonga Creek to Prado Dam, homes were flooded and residents had to be plucked from rooftops by USMC helicopters,” the Report wrote Jan. ![]()
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