It rose out of the tropical Pacific in late 1997

It rose out of the tropical Pacific in late 1997, bearing more energy than a million Hiroshima bombs. By the time it had run its course eight months later, the giant El Niño of 1997-98 had deranged weather patterns around the world, killed an estimated 2,100 people, and caused at least 33 billion [U.S.] dollars in property damage.

	Weekly Pacific Ocean Temperatures

Isaias Ipanaqué Silva knew none of that. All he and the other peasant farmers in the Peruvian hamlet of Chato Chico could see was that after weeks of incessant rain the adjacent Piura River had not stopped rising. The rainfall itself was no surprise. Every three to seven years, for as long as anyone could remember, the same rainfall had arrived after a pool of hot seawater the size of Canada appeared off the west coast of the Americas. The ocean would heat up right around Christmastime, so fishermen called the phenomenon El Niño, for the Christ Child. Then that titanic storm source would pour vast amounts of precipitation onto Peru’s normally arid northwestern coast.
But few had ever seen this much rain—five or six inches a day in some places.Read More