From the Louisiana bayou to the mean streets of Guadalajara, it’s the time of the year that the topic of floods is grabbing front page headlines.

So far lakeside has pretty much been spared the worst of the seasonal miseries.  But the persistent rains of recent days raise worries that disaster could strike at any moment. 

The area has a history of waterspouts, flash floods and landslides that most frequently occur at the peak of the rainy season when mountain terrains are saturated with moisture. And latent dangers have been aggravated by rampant deforestation and under-regulated urban sprawl.

In the summer of 1973, a deluge struck the town of Mezcala in the middle of the night, taking 30 lives. 

In September 1997 and again in September 2007, scores of homes in San Juan Cosala were devastated by debris slides provoked by powerful waterspouts that sucked up water from the lake and emptied them on the mountain range. 

There are numerous historical accounts of Lake Chapala rising above its natural boundaries going back as far as the Colonial era. Perhaps the most tragic of the last century was the great flood of 1926 that inundated lakeshore towns, destroyed agricultural crops and contributed to putting the incipient Chapala railway line out of business.  A phenomena of similar magnitude recurred in 1935.

The most recent major overflow occurred in November 1967 when water suddenly gushed all the way up to the steps of the San Francisco church. Older residents refer to the episode as “the day the lake went to mass.”

The chances of that ever happening again are slim. Chapala hasn’t risen to its full level since the mid-1970’s. It currently stands a just over half its official holding capacity.

Not long ago I ran across a brief reference to what probably rates as the most calamitous flood in Mexican history when the nation’s capital was nearly wiped off the map. With help from Google, I dug deeper on the topic.

Remember that Mexico City was built on the ruins of Tenochtilan, the Aztec capital located on a small island off the western shore of Lake Texcoco. The canny Mexica developed dams and channels to control lake waters surrounding the ancient city. But soon after their arrival in 1521, Hernán Cortés and his band of Spanish conquistadores wrecked the water system as they razed the Aztec empire.

Over the next century the growing capital of New Spain was plagued by periodic flooding until Heinrich Martin (a.k.a Enrico Martínez), a German engineer who settled there, drew up plans for a huge drain to keep lake waters at bay. The project was still under construction in the summer months of 1629 as a prolonged period of torrential rains commenced.

On September 20 a fierce storm broke out, bringing on thunder, lightning and intense rain that fell uninterrupted for 36 hours. Fearful that the unfinished drain would not withstand the deluge, Martinez scurried to close off its control gates. The tactic failed and Texcoco’s waters swept over the city. 

The flooding was so severe that five years passed before the water finally subsided. Meanwhile buildings crumbled, filth and pestilence flourished and fervent prayers of the Catholic faithful brought no relief. Inhabitants fled the devastation en masse, taking up residence on drier terrain in the city of Puebla.

Mexico City eventually recovered, although, like Guadalajara, water management and flooding problems persist to the present day. Let’s hope the country won’t ever witness a repeat of a five-year flood of Biblical proportions.