California Tried but Failed to Have an Extreme Weather Disaster

Opinion by Kip Hansen — 23 August 2023

Hurricane Hilary looked pretty bad when it was charging north parallel to the west coast of Baja California as a Cat 4 hurricane.   I am a compulsive hurricane watcher, a habit left over from my years at sea in both the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean.  I still have family in the Caribbean – so now I watch on their behalf.  

I made the mistake on Saturday to turn on a TV and watch live weather news from Southern California.  Every single weather spokesperson seemed to be under orders to use the words “catastrophic” and “deadly” as many times as possible, sometimes more than once in a single sentence.  They were talking about the future – how the weather was going to be on Sunday and Monday (20 and 21 August). 

I was far more worried about the border towns of Mexico – Tijuana and Mexicali – where poor infrastructure and shantytowns abound.  Mexico did a fantastic job of protecting their people in advance. Thousands of troops were sent in to establish shelters and perform emergency response.  Despite heavy rains and high winds, few lives, only one I believe, were lost.  It could have been far, far worse.

Meanwhile, much of Southern California, with its high building standards and vast governmental resources, was freaking out.  The local weather services and weather news units were beside themselves terrifying the populace with threatened destruction.

And then it rained and the wind blew.  In places unaccustomed to much rain, where storm drains and flood prevention infrastructure is almost non-existent, there was flooding and mud/sand flows.  The desert arroyos were filled and flowing, churning with water and debris.  Where the arroyos crossed roads, the roads were flooded and some washed away.  This is the nature of things in California’s deserts – it was rains like these that created those arroyos.   

Many of the desert cities, flat as pancakes, had no real system in place to handle the inches of rain coming down.  Those cities which gently sloped saw rivers of sand and small rocks flowing down their streets. 

And, of course, owners of houses and buildings built on those nice flat floodplains along dry riverbeds discovered why their lot was so flat:  every 25 years of so, water roars down that dry riverbed pushing mud and rock and sand and trees and flattens everything in its path.

The Los Angeles River, usually empty except for a trickle in a narrow ditch in the middle, was nearly full and the doing its job of carrying away storm water and sparing the city.

But catastrophic and disastrous and deadly?  No, sorry weather people (many of whom, I suspect, wished they were in Florida where they could stand in fake hurricane force winds in front of their expensive hotel pretending to risk their lives to bring you “Today’s Hurricane Live!”), there was no big catastrophic deadly disaster.

“By and large, we’re feeling pretty good about it because we’re not seeing a lot of impacts to homes and residents,” said Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “We’re not seeing a single fatality or injury as of yet.” “Yet in one of the most heavily populated parts of the country — Los Angeles and San Diego Counties alone have a combined population of more than 13 million — there were no reports of deaths related to the storm as of Monday afternoon.” …. “in parts of California closer to the coast, some were puzzled at why the storm had received so much attention…. As the air cleared on Tuesday, Vazken Kouftaian, 40, a resident of Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles, took his 2-year-old son for a walk. This storm, he said, felt more like a normal rain shower. “They were expecting something very bad,” he said. “But it was nothing like that.”   [ source ]

There is a right way to prepare the people of a city or an entire region for heavy winds and rains, for tropical storms, but what took place, the wild exaggerations of alarming threats, is not it.

The right way to prepare a people, a region, for heavy weather threats looks more like this list: 

1.  Officials issuing calm and honest predictions. 

2.  Giving common sense advice to the populace on what they might need to do to prepare – depending on their circumstances. 

3.  Using government resources to ‘harden’ threatened infrastructure – such as having trailer mounted generators available to back up electrical supply to hospitals in case of electrical outages.

4. Calling up National Guard units trained in emergency response and having them and the necessary equipment pre-positioned across the region for ready response. 

Readers with emergency response experience can add to this list in comments.

# # # # #

Author’s Comment:

Every heavy rainfall event in Southern California brings damage, especially to the built environment.  Homes are flooded, damaged and some destroyed.  Families suffer – and for those families, it is a disaster. I don’t mean to downplay or ignore that aspect of this rare event.

But probably the greatest damage was to the minds, hearts and souls in California who were intentionally terrified by the constant stream of threatening “news” pouring out of the TVs and Radios. 

But not the “Vazken Kouftaian”s, those with personal life experience and good critical thinking skills, smart enough to see through the alarmism and remain calm.

What happened instead?  Wildfire risk was greatly reduced, reservoirs were filled, even new reservoirs were filled.  And a superbloom may be in the offing.

Thanks for reading.

# # # # #