After forest fires and drought, now rains torment Southern California
POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Friday, November 7, 2025 15:07
VIEWED: 2836
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Well, that's just "normal" for this time of year down there...Quote:
Severe rain and thunderstorms pounded the Los Angeles suburbs again Saturday, causing more mudslides in Glendora and other towns.
Mandatory evacuation orders for Glendora, Azusa, and Monrovia remained in effect, CNN affiliate KCAL reported. So far, no deaths have been reported.
"We've got people still evacuated only because we expect those thunderstorms, those high-intensity, short duration, type of rain storms," Glendora Police Chief Timothy Staab told KCAL. "The hillsides are already soaked right now, and it may not take much to cause those mudslides to just come down out of the hills."
The hills can't hold water because so much vegetation was destroyed in wildfires and drought.
"These areas have the highest risk of being impacted by flooding/debris flows from rainfall due to the loss of vegetation from the foothills," the city of Glendora said in a statement to KABC, also a CNN affiliate.
In Monrovia, people who choose not to leave will be asked to sign a form acknowledging they know the risk and assume liability for staying in their homes, KABC reported.
The bad weather extended into Burbank, where rain and winds felled a 50-foot tree into an elderly woman's home. She escaped out the back door and wasn't injured.
In Glendora, stories of close calls were easily found on Friday.
Mario Vazquez grabbed his dog and got out of the way, as a stream of water and mud came gushing on to his streets.
Since California has been in the middle of its worst drought in 100 years, it would seem that the sight of rain would be good news.
But in Glendora and other towns in Los Angeles County, it wasn't.
The rain has been much needed, but Friday's deluge -- coming down at more than an inch an hour at times -- landed on bone-dry hills scorched by recent wildfires in and around Los Angeles.
With little vegetation left to stop them, walls of water have gushed into valleys below. They have spewed mud and debris into quiet residential streets, turning them into thick, brown creeks.
More could hit before Saturday is up, the National Weather Service says. It has placed Los Angeles and Ventura counties under a flash flood watch.
By the time it's over up to 6 inches will have landed on the foothills of Los Angeles County and as much as 10 inches on the ridge line.
Weather weirdness
The West Coast rain is expected to end by Sunday, but will move eastward over the weekend. It will bring cold and snow to the central Plains to Ohio Valley late Saturday and Sunday and to the East Coast by Monday.
Cities that will fall in the path of the heaviest snow include Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky; Pittsburgh and Philadelphia; and the Washington, D.C. area.
Severe thunderstorms will be possible across central and eastern Texas and much of Louisiana on Sunday. Damaging thunderstorm winds will be the primary threat and a few tornadoes will be possible.
Several cities will experience yo-yo temperatures. For example, the high in Atlanta will be 71 degrees on Sunday and drop to 54 on Monday. In New York, it will be 40 on Sunday and 26 on Monday; in Washington, 54 and 34, with a chance of 8-10 inches of snow.
In Colorado, one person was killed and 20 were injured after a series of wrecks Saturday that involved an estimated 60 cars, Sonny Jackson, public information officer for the Denver Police Department, told CNN. Jackson said there were three different accident scenes within a short stretch of I-25 North, the first of which involved 45 cars.
The storms brought the first rains since a powerful, persistent weather system collapsed that was keeping California parched. The same system was also at the root of a lot of strange weather around the globe -- all the way to Russia.
A massive, sturdy ridge of high-pressure air had hovered over California, blustering rain clouds away. At the same tim
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God must be really displeased with the folks in CA.
* official TROLLING comment *
( do not take literally )
Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured... but not everyone must prove they are a citizen
I'm just a red pill guy in a room full of blue pill addicts.
" AU, that was great, LOL!! " - Chrisisall
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Climate change, as predicted by reputable scientists.
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NIKI
I was looking at the areas - they're way up in the foothills in very steep terrain. It occurred to me how much public resources go to keeping people safe in very risky areas - fire protection, road clearing, flood protection - including btw those very expensive homes perched ever so precariously on the Malibu cliffs. And I wondered - could we save a lot of public resources by declaring certain areas out of the jurisdiction of public agencies? A 'build at your own risk' caveat.
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It's buried in the middle of that news story, but the rain won't help much with the drought. It's all short-term-- it's gonna, or already has, run off. Unless it gets to the Sierras, it's not gonna do anything for water levels in the reservoirs, or the snow pack we need for spring melt to water us over the summer.
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An article I read recently in the LATimes says that the reservoirs here which provide about a third of the water are down to 25% (if I remember correctly) but the recent rains could fill them adequately. What's desperately low are local groundwater sources.
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Kiki, with regard to what you wrote in your post about very risky areas, "damned straight!" There are many, many places we simply shouldn't be building (I could rant for quite a while about "land fill" and deltas, as well as mountainous regions!), so you're certainly preaching to the choir on that one. I don't see "build at your own risk" as any kind of viable alternative, for all the many reasons I'm sure you can think of just as quickly as I can (!), and of course politics will always end up letting people develop where there's demand, too. Here in Marin, which is virtually all hills, and all the way down the Peninsula when I used to drive back down to the Santa Clara Valley (aka "Silicon Valley") where I was raised, I see building in places which are totally asinine...like hospitals/schools built ON the San Andreas Fault, etc., so I'll stop right here and refrain from ranting about it further.
Yeah, NewOld; all this current rain is doing is making a mess and filling up the reservoirs a bit--it's better than nothing, but won't help the drought much, if at all. A bit less here in Marin, where the majority of our hills and mountains do run off into our five reservoirs, but nonetheless...
I sulkied the dogs up at Phoenix Lake yesterday--it's not one of our water district reservoirs, but they tapped into it this year because of the drought, and it was lovely to see the spillway SPILLING and the creek below a rushing brown. I think only Phoenix and Kent, our "Big Guy", are actually running off...Lagunitas, Bon Tempe and Alpine all spill INTO Kent, but I don't think they're full enough to spill, and Nicasio is up in Novato, I don't get up that way). They let Kent spill off because it feeds Papermill Creek (which is where the first paper mill on the West Coast was and one of our favorite sulky runs), which is a salmon spawning ground, taken care of with kid gloves to keep it safe for the salmon.
That's why I was wondering about the snowpack, which is far more important (except to us here in Marin, since we don't use it and rely mostly on our lakes). What I'm finding thus far is that the ski resorts are happy as clams 'cuz they can finally open, but the recent storms haven't changed the snowpack situation:Quote:
While the snowpack has grown since a month ago, it still is well below the seasonal average, according to a snow survey conducted Thursday by the California Department of Water Resources. The snowpack's water content was only 33 percent of the long-term average at Echo Summit near Lake Tahoe. More at: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/03/01/6200114/snow-allows-more-sierra-ski-r
esorts.html#storylink=cpy
Here is the most recent, as of today (the above was as of Thursday, and we've had storms pretty steadily off and on since then):
Statewide average, according to that: 32% of normal ("28% of average for April 1") (From Ca.gov, Dept. of Water Resources, http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/snowapp/sweq.action). Bear in mind that it's not as much how MUCH snow has fallen, as what the water content of that snow is, which is what the above shows ("snow water equivalent").
HERE (Marin), rain forecast off and on through next Thursday (dunno what that means for So. Ca.), but that doesn't mean much rain, not like an actual STORM, most like drizzle for an hour or two maybe every day or every night, not enough to count for shit.
In other words: We're still screwed.
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About the 'build at your own risk' idea - a girl can dream, can't she?
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Hey, dream away...I used to dream like that...tho' less and less these days, mostly I just try not to THINK about stuff like that...
There's just too much absurdity for me to even dream anymore. During the deluge of '81, we had two houses come down up the street from us. The hillside gave way and a small mudslide slammed into a SWIMMING POOL (the only one I know of anywhere around here), and that's what caused it to take down the rest of the hillside. They'd DONE the studies, they KNEW that hillside was potentially dangerous; they built anyway. A neighbor died in the second house that came down; the house that owned the swimming pool was undamaged.
Y'know??
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