On Saturday January 23, 1943, at 2:57 am, eight on-duty Menlo Park Firefighters from all three of its Fire Stations located in Menlo Park, Atherton and East Palo Alto were called out to a reported levee (or dyke) failure along a rain swollen San Francisquito Creek on to the Peter Fabel Dairy Ranch located in East Palo Alto…”swelled by high tides backing up between 2:00 to 3:00 am, with torrential rain fall resulting in waters reported as high as 3 to 5 feet around homes and trapped by the sudden flood and levee failure”.
Information acquired from the Fire Districts’ archives consisting of Station Day Books and Annual Report from 1943 along with never before publicly seen historical photographs and saved news clips located in Mrs Cuffs “Green Wall Paper sample book“ and from the Times Redwood City Bureau and another unnamed newspaper have helped piece together one of the oldest and most complete records of actual rescues, flood impacts and dramatic measures involving multiple entities, including the military, along the San Francisquito Creek.