Nice But …
California is getting rain, a lot of rain. The precipitation that is falling as snow in the mountains is really good – for skiing and the water supply, but there are mudslides in the burn zones and floods in SoCal, where the infrastructure just can’t handle heavy rain.
In addition to the flooding in Los Angeles, they have a major environmental and public health problem in the form of a natural gas leak:
The governor of California has declared a state of emergency in a suburb of Los Angeles over the leaking of methane gas from an underground storage field.
Methane is an even worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and they don’t believe they will be able to stop the leak before February. People living nearby are reporting health problems.
It seems like every time something goes right for California lately, something else has to happen to offset it.
5 comments
Yes but… Most of our infrastructure is well maintained thanks to the San Andreas and other Californian faults. An exception are the levees in Central Valley and the water systems in conservative counties.
But boy howdy, that water coming down on this end of interstate 10 was very welcome. Today was a dry day, bright, beautiful with small fleecy clouds quicksteping to your end of the interstate. It was weird going home from work: all those cars without that patina of dust and grime.
Shirt
LOL Good luck shirt. Stay “high ‘n’ dry”.
USA does not have a good history with levees. Just sayin’… 😉
There is absolutely no question that the rain and snow were needed and will help with the drought. Dirt levees are generally built with the assumption that they will be wet, and droughts weaken them as the ground cover dies off and ground cracks. It would have been better if the the rain and snow had been over a longer period so it could sink in, but people will take what they can get at this point.
Bryan, the rain was a slow continuous rain, not the sheets of rain that hit your part of the country, so while there was local flooding in places there wasn’t the kind of widespread disasters that would have happened if it’d been gushers like that. It just kept raining for a *long* time!
According to my family, down in San Diego it was good ol’ Gulf Coast thunderstorms, which are definitely rare. In a decade I heard thunder once in San Diego. Of course, San Diego floods with heavy dew.
It is much more important that the rain falls in Northern California, and it snows in the Sierras, because there are storage facilities up there.