How fast-moving floods took a deadly toll on California’s capital: ‘No one expected it’

Jeff Big Jeff uses a raft to move his belongings from his tent at a homeless encampment on Bannon Island, along the Sacramento River, on 4 January. Photograph: Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

The water was waist-high as Bobby Lewis rushed through the darkness trying to get equipment and animals to higher ground. Just hours into the new year, torrential downpours had engorged the Consumnes River that lines the rancher’s Elk Grove property south of Sacramento, California, until it burst through the embankments designed to contain it.

The Lewis family has owned this land for decades and weathered many storms, but this one wouldn’t be easily forgotten. Two of Lewis’s cows drowned during the deluge as they tried to swim to safety, last seen as tangles of legs caught between the barren branches of a submerged tree.