You can’t say it didn’t catch your attention, that June lightning storm, thousands of powerful earthquakes in Los Angeles.One of them killed a Pico Rivera woman while walking two dogs.A TV news report shared the odds of being struck by lightning in an eighty-year life: 1 in 15,300.
For 150 years, Los Angeles has drunk its own climate – PR Kool-Aid: Mild!aromatic!a garden!a paradise!730 days of sunshine a year!
But Los Angeles can be a weather pinball machine: a quiet beauty, but flip the “on” switch on, and pow, bang, ding-ding-ding—the weather murmurs, more often than you might think.
As “Los Angeles in the 1930s: WPA’s Guide to the City of Angels” puts it — so lyrical, in fact, that you can tell it was written by an artist rather than a bureaucrat — Southern California incorporates the landscape of a small country into several of them. thousand square miles.”It is a rugged mountain range separated by deep canyons and towering over peaks 10,000 feet above sea level; a forest and vast desert, rolling foothills, fertile valleys and seasonal rivers leading to the sea; a A region with rugged coasts, coasts, capes, bays and verdant islands washed by the Pacific Ocean.”
Los Angeles is a complicated place.In this weekly feature, Pat Morrison explains how it works, history and culture.
With all these beaches and seaside cliffs, high and low deserts, mountaintops and passes, and rivers that pop up—at least half a dozen microclimates’ worth—the turbulent weather might be a surprise, but it shouldn’t be a shock.Harry P. Bailey’s foundational 1966 book, “The Southern California Climate,” noted that all this “alien” weather—wind, rain, thunder, and lightning from desert air, cold source air, and ocean air—brought Los Angeles a “distant” There is more diversity in weather types than would be expected from purely local conditions.”
So if UCLA and USC really wanted to join the Big Ten, they could say with technical authenticity, “Hey, Icy Rust Belt folks, we’ve got snow too!”
But not often, not much.No real snow has landed in downtown Los Angeles like an Olympic gymnast since January 1962, but as recently as February 2019, snowflakes in Malibu, Northridge, and a few other places made a gust of wind on Twitter.
The temperate climate is no longer just a selling point for Southern California.It’s actually a dogma, tiresome pleasant weather, hard-sold as snake oil.
Robert Frost wrote in his poem “New Hampshire” that he met people from other states.”I met a Californian who would/talk about California – such a happy state/He said, in terms of climate, no one ever dies there/naturally…”
Bob Hope, a native Londoner who plays golf in the eternal sunshine of our spotless greens, keeps an archive of jokes about California’s reverse weather.Actor Monty Woolley is the originator of this quip that can only freeze to death under a blooming rose bush in Southern California.
When you make a big deal — like Southern California — because there’s no dramatic weather, and then you get a huge dose of other stuff like rumbling, crackling June thunderstorms, it seems more than we’ll admit Things like this are even more worrying when the weather happens, and it’s not always “freak.”
The Times uses the word “freak” over and over again to describe weather that contradicts the Chamber’s storyline, as it did in its July 1918 description of “the weirdest storm to hit California in more than 20 years.”It was a lightning storm that ignited oil storage tanks in El Segundo and split an 80-foot-tall pine tree in Pasadena – sure, its human impact was huge, but As a storm, it may not be that weird in itself.
Steve Martin’s role as a weather forecaster in “The Los Angeles Story” sometimes prerecords constant, cloudless forecasts.Then, after he foresees sun-sun-sun, the rain insists on falling, and he is caught.A true Los Angeles weather forecaster, Iowa-born, MIT-educated Kenneth Showalter said in 1951 that there was a tinge of pride even on the printed page, We can boast of the “world’s widest daily weather fluctuations” country.In 1972, a KABC weatherman named Alan Sloane shared the rules of the weatherman: “The 11th commandment of any television weatherman is to go outside the studio before it goes on air.” Look.”
A vision that fuses magical realism, romantic comedy, even Shakespeare and what can only be Martin’s voice, “The Los Angeles Story” finally gets a Blu-ray release on Nov. 9, followed by a live reading of the script provided by the film on Nov. 13 indie .
The fourth-highest 24-hour rainfall on record for the continental United States was an impressive 25.83 inches released in January 1944 by the San Gabriel Mountains, a few miles above the Sierra Madre.The surrounding mountains were a flood-control machine, pouring rainwater down the Arroyo Mountains and canyons, causing deadly floods, most memorably in 1914, 1934 and 1938.
The death toll from the New Year’s Eve floods of 1933-34 has never been accurately counted, but there must have been dozens of deaths in the gullies that started above Montrose and La Crescenta and made their way to the base of the mountains.Among the dead were twin USC cheerleaders and former child actors Winston and Weston Dotty, who drove home from the party.
In 1938, another rain-induced flood—likely a result of an earlier El Niño—inundated miles of Los Angeles.The Oscars have been postponed for a week.At least 100 people were killed in that accident, 15 of whom were standing on the bridge, marveling at the rapidity of the water, when suddenly the flood washed over the bridge.
Los Angeles Mayor Frank Shaw told Americans silkily on the radio: “The sun is shining in Southern California today, and … Los Angeles is still smiling.” Six months later, he was recalled, not for lying about the weather—that It’s his civic duty – but because of corruption.
A year after the 1938 Old Testament floods, rain, hail, thunderstorms, double rainbows, and heavy snow shook different parts of Los Angeles’ Beverly Hills all at once, with hail the size of nickels, and such comparisons must be insulting to the suburbs of folded currency .
By September, temperatures were over 100 degrees, and a heavy rainstorm in Riverside County meant 75 workers on the San Jacinto River levee had to be evacuated.Talk about your microclimate: Gilman Springs gets 5 inches of rain in two hours, but hardly enough rain in Hemet, about 7 miles away, to say “it’s raining” before you stop this phrase.
In January 1932, nearly two hours of snow fell, enough to make a census of lazy snowmen in parts of Los Angeles.
[Note that even in Los Angeles County, agriculture was a huge industry, and until around 1950 the county was the most profitable agricultural county in the United States.”Freak” doesn’t just mean confusingly different weather; it can mean the difference between a crop and a crop failure.)
A thunderstorm in June 1931 sparked eight forest fires and injured four Pomona boys as they rode their bicycles around a large tree in front of the Pomona YMCA that was electrocuted.Another bolt pierced a three-foot hole in the roof of the San Dimas Orange Growers Association.buildings and thoughtfully sounded the fire alarm.
Santa Ana winds, like apple pie, come and go hot or cold, but they’re always zipping by and whistling.In December 2011, they pushed the hurricane count to Category 2, with sustained winds of 97 mph in the foothills of the San Gabriel, uprooting trees such as many young carrots in the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Huntington Library and Gardens.
In March 1963, a 50-mph dust storm forced the Angels and Houston Colts .45 — two years before they were renamed the Astros — and their 7,000 fans off the field in Palm Springs.The same large storm system shed enough snow on Mount Cheviot in West Los Angeles for a snowball fight.
In February 1983, tornadoes and epoch-making rainstorms drove the visiting Queen of England – the sovereign of some very wet islands – from her yacht here away from dry land.The same storm sent funnel clouds raging south of Los Angeles, levitating cars, overturning mobile homes and prying off a chunk of the roof of the Los Angeles Convention Center.It also gave the local TV news station the rare opportunity to play “Tornado Watch” on our screens.
After the blizzard of 1932—if you can call it a few inches—the Times tracked down US Weather Service meteorologist LH Daingerfield.He calmly evokes our hysteria:
“I always find it kind of funny to hear Southern California weather being called ‘unusual’…People here are so used to mild winds and calm, mild weather that when something untimely happens, like When it snows, they start shouting, “This is so unusual!”The uniformity of our ‘usual’ climate makes even the slightest ‘unusual’ variation apparent.”
Pat Morrison is a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times and has shared two Pulitzer Prizes as a member of two reporting teams.Her public radio shows have won her six Emmy Awards, her two nonfiction books are bestsellers, and the Hollywood hot dog shop Pink’s has named her veggie dog after her.
Post time: Aug-02-2022