‘Drought & Flood’

Mike Hoover’s New History of South Coast Water Predicts Drought in Santa Barbara and Beyond

The cover of a new book by Mike Hoover, a Santa Barbara geologist, shows a flood of mud and debris at the Montecito Inn on Coast Village Road following the catastrophic debris flow of Jan. 9, 2018 | Photo by Mike Eliason, Santa Barbara County Fire Dept.

Mike Hoover, a Santa Barbara geologist, supervised the drilling of 300 wells in his career, mostly for private landowners from Montecito to Goleta | Photo by Melinda Burns.

Mike Hoover, a Santa Barbara geologist, wants to remind us of the Medieval Drought, the epic dry period that held California and the West in its grip for 400 years, beginning in 950 CE.

“That thing was really bad,” said Hoover, who mentioned the mega-disaster in his new book, Drought & Flood: The History of Water in Santa Barbara and Montecito. It was so bad, he said, that it may have led to malnutrition and warfare among the prehistoric Chumash.

“I keep telling people, ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,’” Hoover said. “We’ve been in an abnormally wet cycle in the last three or four hundred years, and that’s changing now. Climate change will amplify the ongoing trend to dryness.”