California battered by ‘potentially historic’ storm. 38 million have flood alerts. What If California had channeled this water to fill reservoirs instead of the ocean?
State Emergency
The Office of the Governor reports Gavin Newsom Proclaimed a State of Emergency for eight counties in Southern California as a series of winter storms began impacting much of the state with high winds, damaging rain and heavy snowfall.
The proclamation covers Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. The emergency proclamation includes provisions authorizing a California National Guard response if tasked, facilitating unemployment benefits for impacted residents, and making it easier for out-of-state contractors and utilities to repair storm damage.
Historic Storm
NBC has Live Updates of a Potentially Historic Storm
- A severe storm system began moving through California Sunday and into Monday, marking the start of what’s expected to be days’ worth of heavy rain and snow.
- Some 38 million people are covered by flood alerts due to a weather system the National Weather Service said could be “potentially historic.”
- Over 500,000 customers are without power in California as of Monday morning, mostly in the northern and central parts of the state, although Los Angeles is also reporting 4,000 powerless homes and businesses.
- Heavy rain led to mandatory evacuations for parts of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties on Sunday and firefighters rescued 16 people from a single street in Los Angeles as mudslides caused havoc.
- At least two people have died in tree fall incidents associated with the severe weather.
- 9.94 inches of rain was recorded near the University of California, Los Angeles; 6.33 inches north of Culver City; and 3.35 inches in Santa Barbara.
- A top wind gust of 138 mph was clocked in Ward Peak near Lake Tahoe, 120 mph in Upper Bull at Patterson Mountain, and 94 mph in Grapevine, California.
Wettest Day Ever in Los Angeles
What About Insurance?
CNN reports, As floods recede, many Californians could be returning to damaged homes that aren’t covered by insurance
Many victims of the massive storms now battering Southern California about are to be hit with another heartbreak — discovering their insurance won’t cover the damage.
The typical homeowners’ policy won’t cover loss from flood damage. That is covered by the National Flood Insurance Program, a part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But in California, where drought, not flooding, had been the more common problem until recently, homeowners are about as prepared for flood damage as hurricane-prone Florida residents are for earthquakes.
A look at the numbers: Data from NFIP shows only 52,400 homes and businesses are covered by flood insurance in the eight Southern California counties declared a disaster area because of this storm.
That’s less than 1% of 7.7 million households in the affected area with coverage. Those counties have a combined population of more than 22.6 million people, according to the latest estimates from the Census Bureau.
Los Angeles County, with more than 10 million residents, has only 14,600 flood insurance policies in force.
Atmospheric River Parked Over Southern California
A powerful atmospheric river-fueled storm is moving at an agonizingly slow pace across Southern California, directing a firehose of moisture at deluged cities for hours at a time.
Storms normally track across the US from west to east at a steady pace, but a feature in the atmosphere well above the surface is standing in this storm’s way, causing it to get stuck over Southern California. With nowhere to go, the storm continues to tap into the tropical moisture in the atmospheric river, increasing the heavy rain and flood threat.
The storm’s slow pace is very bad news for the region, as the longer rain lingers, the worse the flooding will likely become.
“This setup is a textbook case for widespread flooding,” the Weather Prediction Center said Monday morning.
An additional 1 to 3 inches of rain is possible across the Los Angeles basin Monday, with an additional 3 to 6 inches of rain in the area’s mountains and foothills. Multiple feet of heavy snow will bury the region’s highest elevations.
The National Weather Service in Los Angeles said an “extremely dangerous situation” is happening in the “Hollywood Hills area and around the Santa Monica Mountains” just outside of Los Angeles, adding that “life threatening landslides and additional flash flooding” were expected.
Question of the Day
Instead of massive regulations, free money handouts to immigrants, an absurd focus on DEI, and moaning about drought, what if California channeled a small amount of tax revenues to capture this rain and sent it to reservoirs instead of the ocean?
But no.
And as a result of rising taxes wasted on nonsense, Californians are in the midst of a Great Escape.
Great Escape
For discussion, please see Great Escape: What Metro Areas Are Attracting the Most New Renters?
Flight is not limited to individuals. Ridiculous regulations have fueled business flight and another round is coming up.
Please note Cost of Running a McDonalds Jumps $250,000 in CA Due to Minimum Wage Hikes
Prices at fast food restaurants in California are set to jump in April as huge minimum wage hikes kick in.
California is a disaster zone in multiple ways, and most of them are self inflicted.
As of 6am 2/06/24 KNX news reported that (unconfirmed) Bel-Air has had 15 inches of rain during the storm. Westwood has had 12 inches. KNX was referring to it as a 1,000 year storm.
– What if California channeled a small amount of tax revenues to capture this rain and sent it to reservoirs instead of the ocean?
> Great question, but that wouldn’t allow for things like: Newsom declares state of emergency proclamation (opens up all sorts of money to spend), The emergency proclamation includes provisions authorizing a California National Guard response if tasked, facilitating unemployment benefits for impacted residents, and making it easier for out-of-state contractors and utilities to repair storm damage.
– Many victims of the storms are about to be hit with another heartbreak — discovering their insurance won’t cover the damage.
> Only those not breathing, paying attention, or are simply clueless. In my parents State anyway, you must be approved for it, you must also Pay For It, so if you didn’t go through the approval process, and get approved for flood insurance (my parents have to have it), and are not paying for it monthly, then you don’t have it and it should be of no surprise. Just drama…
– We can see that the firefighters are not doing there jobs. As firefighters rescued 16 people from a single street in Los Angeles.
> Maybe try cleaning up the homelessness, and mental illness strewn across CA. Streets. Then our tax paid Firefighters could be answering a fire call, instead of taking drug attics living on the streets illegally, to safety from themselves and the Newsom Government in CA. Just a thought…
– Prices at fast food restaurants in California are set to jump in April as huge minimum wage hikes kick in.
> Yet another unforced error by Newsom, you know the Democrat Savior (Isn’t Gavin, Pelosi’s son or nephew or something like that..) to replace Pelosi as the CA. Queen Bee.
– California is a disaster zone in multiple ways, and most of them are self inflicted.
> Hitting the nail on the head again Mish, but isn’t CA. just such an incredibly easy target? The worst run state in the Nation by far! Leadership that is absolutely insane, and by definition in many cases IMO.
Will 2024 be the year of “Self Implosion” for CA.?
Probably since before the days of the TV show Emergency, firefighters mostly go out on paramedic calls, rather than fires, anyway. I once saw the actor who played Dr. Bracket at a local restaurant, shortly after i worked on an episode of Walker Texas Ranger, in which he appeared.
I live in Costa Mesa, California which sits in the middle of the coast of Orange County. This is supposedly ground zero for the storm. It has been a big nothingburger here. We have accumulated approximately one inch of rainfall over the past 2 days. So much for a state of emergency.
Its the aftermath that does the damage.
The flood waters have a high content of mud solids in the water that fills up reservoirs with mud making them fill up with sediment within years, or decades. In dry climates the slopes are extremely steep and the amount of mud is extreme. “Even before reservoirs fill completely with sediment, sediment within the reservoir can reduce usable capacity, interfere with outlet works, damage turbines, and cause backwater flooding upstream [Morris and Fan, 1998]. Reservoirs filled with sediment may be at greater risk during earthquakes because accumulated sediment deposits are denser than water and may exert greater force against the dam during seismic shaking [Chen and Hung, 1993]. Reservoir sediments are also a significant global sink for carbon and other important nutrients [Vorosmarty et al., 2003; Stallard, 1998]. In addition, the trapped sediment is not available for downstream economic and ecological benefits, such as beach replenishment [Willis and Griggs, 2003] or salmonid habitat, and release of sediment-starved water commonly causes bed incision in the downstream channel, which can result in downstream stream bank erosion, infrastructure damage, and drawdown of the alluvial water table [Williams and Wolman, 1984; Kondolf, 1997].[3] In the design and maintenance of most reservoirs, little thought has been given to sustaining reservoir functions as capacity is progressively lost to sedimentation. Loss of reservoir capacity from sedimentation is difficult to offset with construction of new reservoirs because reservoirs have already been constructed at most viable sites in the developed world [Morris and Fan, 1998]. Maintaining reservoir capacity into the future will require that we address capacity losses from sedimentation, which requires tools to predict sedimentation rates and to identify reservoirs vulnerable to rapid sedimentation.https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2007WR006703
It is easy to toss out logical sounding criticisms like capture all that water but the actual reality on the ground is more complex than simple shout outs to do something. This is not a political potion for me. I am a geologist and have seen reservoirs fill with sediment and then with no sediment getting past the dam the stream bed has no stones sand or mud replacement and quickly turns into a deep gorge with collapsing sides damaging real estate. Then down further at the coast no more sand gets to the beach and then goodbye to the beach tourism industry. Beaches in some dammed areas are depleting. Beaches dissipate wave energy. Waves hitting directly on shore erode away home sites. Goodbye house and all that money. There are attempts to flush the sediments out of reservoirs and the engineering of that is mostly ineffective. Dredging and trucking out is of such a huge scale that the diesel cost alone is a deal killer.
Thanks!
Excellent info. Thank you.
Yeah, damns can be an artificial disaster, as you outlined. Look at the natural landscape of California. Its coastal area is a giant runoff for rain; the landslides are a natural progression of the coast. A more significant issue is the fast water runoff due to paving and concrete not allowing water to settle into the soil and become groundwater. Trying to stop nature instead of working with it never works; man creates more significant disasters.
Gotta love everyone bashing everything. It turns out mother nature doesn’t care and will be random and indiscriminate no matter what. We continue to think we can do whatever we want as humans without any consequences. That s the real story.
Nonsense! This is clearly divine retribution for shunning Dear Leader.
Cadillic desert is the standard read on the development of water resources in the west. If you want a deeper dive (a view of the river) will blow your mind.
In a nut shell. Pretty much all of the keyhole dam sites are build up. Along with a bunch of not so economically feasible secondary sites. Something like 40 percent of ca water reserve is held in snow pack. Rain snow all winter bone dry all summer.
I have some ocean front property in Arizona
“(Wettest day ever 5.88″ on 3/2/1938.)”
That was the flood that resulted in lining the L.A. river in concrete, in part along side Universal, Warner Bros. and Republic Studios, now known as the CBS Studio Center.
No flooding where i live. Hours of non stop rain, but nothing that i would call a hard downpour on my block. The storm is moving through very slowly, which is causing the rain accumulation with an “atmospheric river” that used to be called a Pineapple Express, as it originates in the vicinity of Hawaii. Climate alarmists will want to blame it on Global Warming. Last winter we had more atmospheric river storms. This winter we have generally been behind the normal rainfall to date, despite it being an El Nino year.
Extreme weather events such as atmospheric rivers, floods, droughts etc have been occurring for millions of years. We can see that in the geologic record that scientists study. So we know that this isn’t anything new.
In addition, we also know that a warming ocean and atmosphere provide the conditions that make these events more likely to be even more extreme. That’s easy to predict. What is difficult to predict is where, when, and how much more extreme these events will becone.
Agree. What’s telling how quickly things go from drought to deluge. This will more mudslides. Colorado has been in drought but one year soon they will get epic precipitation that will cause mudslides. It is sort of unavoidable and unpredictable. This is why insurers have paused on new policies in some places. It will be caveat emptor in many places. The banks will find a way to foist all this on the consumer and continue to sell mortgages, securitize and pass the trash. My guess is the banks would love socialized insurance that allows them to continue transactions on real estate.
Back in i think it was 1982, before Global Warming was being talked about, water went over the spillway at Hoover Dam on the Colorado River and The Great Salt Lake was in danger of overflowing onto Interstate 80. In Summer 1977 Actor Lorne Green was urging Angelino’s to conserve water during a drought. The winters of 77 & 78 were subsequently very rainy. The projected Super El Nino several years ago was a big dud in Los Angles. We got more rain the next year, when the spillway up north at Oroville was partially destroyed. This winter we had some storms that fizzled out by the time they got down to Los Angeles, which flies in the face of the current record storm. The climate alarmist will only focus on this storm, not the ones that fizzled out.
So Los Angeles’ wettest day ever was 5.8 inches back in 1938…?
To quote Mick Dundee… “That’s not a rain event…THIS is a rain event…”
Last week, a suburb about an hour’s north of me had 300 millimetres of rain in just three hours – that’s about a foot….
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/30/qld-weather-floods-queensland-brisbane-heavy-rain-flooding-seq-severe-storms
Always good to think about issues like these. I appreciate the process. I do believe a large reservoir is being build in Central CA somewhere.
The rain capture is mostly snow. California is out of the drought for the next several years. The snowpack is amazing.
The shots people take at California are such a small percentage of anything. Oddly I see more out of state license plates here than ever and people are coming from all states. We keep track and have seen 41 of 50 state license plate in our locale of about 5 mile radius. It is truly bizarre and doesnt appear to be a red/blue state phenomenon as is widely reported by some. Some people are moving here while others are leaving. It is all anecdotal evidence but it is real to be sure.
By the way I hope those other states do well and.enjoy the rampant growth. I am pretty sure it is making some folks miserable as I hear stories of some people coming back to California. One friend said he got so ill from the petroleum smog in Houston,.he decided to move back to San Diego sometimes even when you think you are going to win you lose due to unforeseeable things. The law of unintended consequences.
The people that hate California are the ones that can’t afford it and feel diminished by that fact.
“….I hear stories of some people coming back to California.”
Lots and lots do. No matter how much some loon theoretically fancies living in “progressive” Canuckistan: Reality is, he ends up wasting a combined two years of his life just putting on, taking off and shaking the water off of, his gigantic pile of everything from down coats to rain coats to who-knows what. Only to then spend the remainder of his frozen life shoveling snow and putting on and removing snow tires; and sliding off the road….
California didn’t just magically happen to have all the worst politicians fall out of the sky to land on it. Instead, California is governed the way it is, specifically because politicians can get away with more here than they can in the populated deep freezers of the world. People still won’t leave. If the Newsom/Pelosi gang ran pretty much any other state, that state’s population would be Newsom and Pelosi and that’s it. While in CA, people put up with them. After all, the alternative is even worse: A life consisting of little more than futzing around with either throat-burning-dry aircon air, or permanent fear of imminent freezing to death.
I mean: We still have 30+million here. Despite not having had a government even remotely close in quality to even Idi Amin’s, since long before Idi Amin. Just imagine how crowded the place would be if we, on top of all the God given advantages, also had half competent government. The whole darned country would be here, then. In addition to that whole darned country south of here. Along with, overwhelmingly likely, the frostbiters from the country someways north of here, too.
Heck, perhaps Californians actually know full and well who they are electing. Such that the illiterate, ghoulish scarecrows are actually there to do the job of scaring everyone else away. It’s crowded enough as it is, you state-line jumper! Get back to where you came from, or Pelosi will come bite you!
Yeah, not really though. Your conclusion is a little more than strange to me on this being the thinking. Some of us were born, raised, and finally saw how screwed up CA has become by these so called “leaders” you folk have put in place ruining arguably the greatest state in the Nation by almost every way possible.
Being from NorCal, you can have Central and SoCal; we didn’t want them and they are nothing like us. They steal our water and drive up the price of gas and housing and try to tell the upper third of the state that’s how it is.
Fine. Cut the state in thirds and stay in your part. Leave us the best part of the state, that still remains largely rural and untouched. CA was at it’s best through balance in its politics, economy and education, not this crap today everyone is just accepting as the way it is.
I grew up thinking people in OR were weird and WA was basically Canada. When you finally leave CA, sure, you miss the natural beauty and convenience of accessing it, but I can never fully return and accept what it is now (it’s fine for a brief visit). It is an experiment gone horribly wrong, in almost every way possible. That is not something to brag about and I don’t care how many people you feed with the Central Valley or how much software you produce in Cupertino.
And to think, folks up here in WA are trying to prevent it from becoming CA 2.0, and are starting to realize that repealing stupid Gub overreach like CA is actually possible if you get enough signatures (excessive gas taxes, taxing unrealized gains, repealing anti-police laws). I strongly applaud WA for at least trying to undo some bad knee-jerk decisions (unlike CA), since they’ve let it get so bad even the far left have signed on to some of these things. Guess they’re tired of getting robbed and burglarized too after four years of letting criminals do whatever they want like CA.
Sorry for the rant but, CA gets what it deserves. Their Gub is a reflection of their horrible cycle of let’s spend and tax and regulate our way out of everything. There are serious societal matters that should be decided through balance and deliberation of consequences, not more committees who can’t account for their horrible academic / financial experiments to understand basic societal issues.
CA thinking when faced with any problem like homelessness, gun control, drug addiction and housing has become laughably predictable and could never be considered seriously to solve any true problems elsewhere (ever heard of a root cause analysis CA?). MORE committees to study and deliver nothing, more regulations to regulate everything including basic life decisions, more taxes to continue to fund the insane loop.
I have a little hope for WA; zero for my home state.
During one major flood in the past I considered a similar question of what to do. The best solution is at the national level since many regions flood, but never at the same time. Similarly many areas experience drought, but not all at the same time. My proposal is to harvest rain water and distribute it through a network of pipes. Pipes also provide storage. This solution has a caveat; the demand for water must always remain 20% below the 5 year average supply. In other words, population necessarily has to be limited.
Liberal politics cause floods, got it. Why are there floods in Texas and Florida?
You should take a course in reading comprehension. It might help.
Liberal politics does not cause floods.
But extremely easy-to-live-in climates enable, hence cause, moronic governance. Since people won’t realistically leave anyway. They may bitch and moan. But bad as Newsom is, few are willing to freeze to death, just to spite the guy.
Then, during those two days per decade when the climate ends up being a little bit less agreeable; how moronic government really has become, becomes truly, painfully obvious.
Such that everyone is all up in arms, threatening to leave for better governed, less overcrowded, Siberia.
For all of a day or two. Until the weather goes back to normal again. Then; even slightly less horrifically governed; life on frozen tundras and in steaming swamps, don’t seem so appealing after all.
Look on the bright side. It’ll at least wash the poop away.
In 1862 an atmospheric river hit California and it rained for 42 days. The Central Valley became a gigantic lake from North to south. All the cattle drowned and the farms destroyed. Imagine the damage it it happens now.
And it had absolutely nothing to do with the C02 driven anthropomorphic global warming scam
Just imagine how many trillions they had to print to save the economy and especially the housing market?
How can you capture the water on a sloping plain?
Houston has Addick’s Reservoir, that wasn’t very helpful during their last floods.
I lived in Houston for 6 years and the streets are used to carry rain water, but many of the houses are below street level. Plus the southern border of the city is 40 feet above sea level and the northern boundry (40 miles north) is 44 feet above sea level. Too flat for the rain to run off.
Well, Houston got 50 inches of rain in that storm. If it had just been 40, we’d have been ok.
Houston is New Orleans 2.0 for flooding. Didn’t believe it until I saw it.
As a former 10 year resident of Fontana, putting 38 million under this is just more Newscum idiocracy. Nowhere near that many areas will flood, in fact MOST WONT.
Historically, LA isn’t an area where one has to worry about flooding. Fires and Santa Ana wind damage are much more likely.
Time for a fresh round of blaming it on globaloneywarming and further restrict the proles (but not the Hollywood or left wing elites with their private jets and yachts).
The thermometer hasn’t existed long enough to say today’s temperatures are warmer than previous centuries. Thus, it is not gobal warming, but climate change, because that is meaningless.
“What If California had channeled this water to fill reservoirs instead of the ocean?”
I don’t know whose talking point you are parroting but California already has a very high number of reservoirs. Not very many good sites left. The problem is that the peak flows are huge so to really reduce flooding the areas need to be very large and they would be empty most of the time. And dams do reduce the number of flood events but the flooding events tend to be more severe. This is because people will develop areas in the flood plain because of the rarity of flooding, the river channels become clogged with vegetation due to the reduced normal flow, and when a large atmospheric event does overwhelm the reservoirs then even more water is flowing due to releasing stored water along with the rainfall to prevent a dam failure.
The few rivers that do not have reservoirs are all on the north coast with nowhere to distribute the water, they are prime salmon rivers, and even though they do flood like all rivers do, they don’t cause much damage because there are very few people there.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_reservoirs_of_California#/media/File:Water_in_California_new.png for a map of many (but not nearly all) of the reservoirs in California.
See https://www.ppic.org/water/ if you want to get more facts about water in California.
I am not talking about more reservoirs. I am looking for a way to fill Lake Mead.
How does California build reservoirs that would would fill Lake Mead which is in Nevada, hundreds of miles away on the other side of the Mohave Desert? The geography makes this all but impossible.
Lake Mead is filled by the Colorado River, which is filled by snow melt and the Green River, which is bigger than the Colorado. The Colorado use to be the Grand River, hence Grand County, Grand Lake, and Grand Junction (junction of the Grand and the Gunnison) named for it.
If interested I will explain the politics of renaming the Grand to the Colorado River?
LA is a valley. You’d have to get he water reverse pumped out to NV.
We can’t even pave our roads here or complete a 20 year old high speed rail line. A project like this is beyond our capability. We’d need to hire the biblical Egyptians to get this done!
More reservoirs would be helpful but they should be undergrounds to minimize evaporation. Again, something that has been talked about for decades but never becomes actionable.
Do you get water from Lake Mead ? I read California has stronger water rights than Arizona and Nevada. The water helps the crops and irrigation and there is a fair amount of capture to be sure.
That is certainly possible. There would have to be at least 242 miles of pipeline and/or canals (probably along the route of the Colorado River Aqueduct). It would be a net energy use system, and if it was a high water year in the Rockies (i.e. Lake Mead near capacity) you would have no where to pump.
I am an engineer. The problem is that when one designs the system it has to handle peak flows which are thousands of times average flows. The cost is proportional to the peak flow but the benefit (i.e. value of water) is proportional to the average flow.
Now there is a benefit to flood prevention but it is most cost effectively addressed by not developing in flood prone areas. But with the value of land (especially land for housing) in California there are developers that push for development of land that shouldn’t be developed, at least not for housing. Developed perhaps for parks and other uses that can be routinely flooded.
I am also quite against flood insurance, at least public flood insurance. It is subsidized and encourages development in flood prone areas. If someone wants flood insurance let them go to a private company (there are none now because no one can compete with the below market rates of public insurance).
That was my thought exactly, this is probably some talking point going around wackoville twitter.
Well it might wash some of the terds out to sea.
Reports of California’s demise are greatly exaggerated.
More than one thing can be true at the same time. It isn’t the utopia the lemmings singing its praises think it is. It also isn’t the worst State in the Union…
The county of LA has spent a bunch of money and finished a big project to capture storm water. It’s located on the east side of the Angeles basin and will capture a lot of water. On the Westside tho I’m watching a lot of water go into the ocean via these cement channels we call rivers here. The condo I’m at right now basement parking flooded and filled the elevator shaft…fun fun!
Isn’t the LA system to hold and process the rainwater as sewage (which otherwise would sweep homeless feces into to the ocean), rather than stored for re-use?
Seriously, CA is living on aging infrastructure from the golden years (1960s) … now with double the population.
“Seriously, CA is living on aging infrastructure from the golden years (1960s) … now with double the population.”
America. Not just California.
Mormonia outside of the immediate Salt Lake area being, perhaps, the lone larger-than-the-occasional-exurb exception.
Replace the 60s with the 80s/early-90s, and Europe as well. Heck, even the better-than-thou Japanese, got a lesson in even-Japanese-stuff-from-the-80s-don’t-last-forever-come-what-may, from Fukushima.
Fukushima was a direct result of the Japanese culture failing to listen to the Americans about placing nuclear safety related backup systems outside the nuclear island. No US nuclear plant does this. The Japanese found this feedback disrespectful and ignored it. Totally preventable, even with 45 feet of water coming over the wall they were supposed to build. I’ve been in nuclear over 21 years and we go over the lessons-learned every year because of the Japanese. Plenty of those vintage reactors are running just fine in the US. This was a design problem and an ego / culture problem, not a tsunami problem. 93 US Reactors, most built by 1983, are holding up under 60-80 year license extensions.
Not disagreeing with you on American infrastructure in general, but nuclear is built 10x more resilient than any other infrastructure.
“This was a design problem and an ego / culture problem, not a tsunami problem.”
That’s exactly it: Per many Japanese: Anything Japanese from the 80s, simply can not be less than perfect.
The stuff is no doubt good. But still: Things _can_ go wrong.
If only they paid more in taxes this wouldn’t be happening.
I take my hat off to the pilot who landed my Hawaiian Airlines flight in Sacramento last night inbound from Maui. The winds were something else.
El nino is a seven year cycle. 5 more years to go.
Nope. Most El Ninos last 9-12 months. And this one is weakening and almost done.
“What If California had channeled this water to fill reservoirs instead of the ocean?”
BINGO! My neighbor is high up working for the Buena Park Water department, and we have talked about the local “drought” for a decade on and off. He always mentions there should be no local drought, no bend-over-backwards regulations (many times here in Orange county you are not allowed to water your lawns or wash your car on certain days of the week to conserve water during the dry years), and no need for a de-salinization plant off the coast (something I used to champion).
He mentions it would be so cheap and easy to channel the rain water to existing reservoirs or build a few more if we wanted a huge surplus; it would completely eliminate all drought issues in Orange County. He is baffled that CA channels every drop of rain it can straight into the ocean and then cries about having no water.
I really don’t know enough about the specifics of Buena Park geography to comment but: Has your neighbor “figured out” that Thorium reactors is “what we need” as well….?
As a general rule: Far and away most arid areas on earth, get plenty of rain over the year, if only all of it could be “captured” and saved. It’s a bit like solar and wind power that way. Still: After thousands of years of this being obvious: Aside from perhaps the rice paddies of Asia, nowhere has such “water capture and save” been even remotely successfully done.
Even more generally: Humans, as well as even their largest machines and buildings; are still very small and insignificant in the bigger scheme of things. Even “Big Time” geoengineering, really isn’t.
I wonder what the insurance tab will be for this non-climate change disaster. Will premiums go higher for everyone? Will it be more from the last one or the next one? Good thing there’s no climate issues. /s
Not in this case because 99% of these people are going to eat the losses because they don’t have flood insurance. They are out of luck. If its wind damage or a tree falling on the house that’s fine. Anything from ground water up, landslide or water they will get zero. Have to have flood.
If college students that knowingly took out student loans do not have to pay them back, why should homeowners without insurance be expected to pay for home repairs caused by an act of God.
I suspect we’ll be hearing demands soon for those “fat-cat” homeowners insurers to pick up the tab anyway coverage or not.
Watch insurance rates rise in California just like it has in Florida, another reason to leave the liberal utopia known as California. God help us if grease ball runs for president and wins.
Wait you mean insurance rates rise in conservative utopia of Florida ? But how ?
Which greaseball..I see multiple greaseballs vying for 2028.