FYI...The washout occurred at Rat Creek, which is about 15 miles south of the town of Big Sur and 6 miles north of Lucia Lodge. Looking at Google Earth (36° 5'31.46"N, 121°37'6.81"W), there was no bridge here, so the creek would have crossed under Hwy 1 in a culvert. A culvert that is now gone.
During the recent storms, Cambria--about 48 miles south of the washout--received >10" of rain and Ragged Point--about 27 miles south of the washout-- received >13" (
I suspect the coastal mountains in the Rat Creek watershed may have received 15" or more over about a two-day span.
On the other hand, the airport at Monterey--about 36 miles north of the washout--received only about 4 inches (
Nearby Carmel Valley, which is in a bit of a rain shadow, was about the same per WeatherUnderground. We received about 3.4 inches in Fresno, which is nearly 1/3 of our annual average.
Back to Rat Creek. Using a Google Earth polygon, I roughly estimated the size of the watershed to be about 3.4 sq mi, with a covering that is about half trees (probably oaks on the hillsides and something else in the stream beds) and half scrub. The longest drainage path is about 1.6 miles long and drops from an inland elevation of about 2750 ft down to about 225 feet at Hwy 1, for a watershed height of about 2525 ft. That's an average slope of 30%. I want to look more into the hydrology, but I will have to research to see what type of information I can find for this relatively remote area...and it's lunch time so it will have to wait.
Maybe somebody who does large watershed hydrology more often than I do can take this on.
BTW, my wife and I know this part of Hwy 1 fairly well, having traveled it about a dozen times over the years, sometimes north to south and sometimes south to north. A couple years ago, my wife and I camped for a week at Limekiln State State Park, which is only about 2 miles south of Lucia Lodge. During this trip, we took a day to drive up Hwy 1 to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium, so we drove through this spot twice. Back in high school in the mid-1970s, my wife (then only an acquaintance) and I were part of a week-long 240-mile bicycle trip with about 90 other high schoolers from Big Sur to Santa Barbara. Riding on the outside of Hwy 1 is quite the experience. In many places the paved shoulder is only about a foot wide, then there may be a few feet of dirt, and then there is a steep drop-off to the ocean. The good news is that the we didn't lose anyone over the edge.
Fred
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"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill
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