Wind In Los Angeles

I’ve recently written about how Los Angeles residents respond to rain (badly) and cold (not much better), so let’s talk about a much more common weather affliction — wind.

For those unfamiliar with the Los Angeles area, we have a thing here called “Santa Ana Winds“. The short version is that high pressure builds up to our northeast, which causes winds from that direction. But those winds get funneled through a whole slew of mountain passes. They get compressed, speed up, and then vent out into the valleys blowing a gale. It’s not uncommon for there to be sustained thirty to forty knot winds with gusts to seventy or eighty. And better yet, it can go on like that for days.

In the summer, when it’s already pushing 90F or higher, the Santa Anas will heat things up even more (adiabatic heating), dry things out even more, and take any tiny spark out in the mountains or desert and turn it into a 10,000 acre brush fire. The folks who fight wildfires hate the Santa Anas.

In the winter, when it gets unseasonably cold and the temperatures drop down close to freezing at night and only into the low 50’s during the day (like it has been for the last week), the Santa Anas can blow, but they don’t bring any relief from the cold. I don’t know why, it seems they would, but they don’t. Ask Fritz Coleman or Doctor George. What they do is take the wind chill down into the teens at night, which makes the cold all the worse.

Houses in Los Angeles aren’t built like houses in a normal city where you actually have four seasons. Houses here are built to stay cool, because 90% of the year it’s hot, or at least warm. We have almost no insulation at all, and while we typically have great air-conditioning, our furnaces are almost an afterthought.

When it gets cold and the Santa Anas blow, it’s like living in one of those ice castles in Finland or China.

We also get most of the other wind related problems that are simply associated with forty knot sustained winds with gusts to eighty knots. Semis and campers get blown off the road. Trees come down. Power goes out. Roofs lose shingles. Patio furniture ends up in the pool or in the neighbor’s yard.

It also makes it hard to sleep, at least for me. We have several orange trees in the back yard and the oranges are just getting big and ripe and tasty. One of these trees is right on the other side of our bedroom wall. When the Santa Anas start blowing in the middle of the night, I find out about it with dozens of oranges bashing and smashing into the wall for hours.

I’ve also gotten to fly in these winds. It’s…exciting. At Whiteman in Pacoima where I normally fly, the usual runway is Runway 12 (pointing southeast). When the Santa Anas blow you switch around (always take off and land into the wind) so you’re on Runway 30. Not only do you get to deal with the wind and some nasty turbulence, but you’re also getting a sight picture and traffic pattern that you see only every now and then. If you’ve never flown pattern work in a Cessna 172 when the Santa Anas are blowing, you’ve missed a real “E Ticket” ride.

Finally, as with everything else in Los Angeles, our local news can blow everything out of proportion at the drop of a hat. When we get 0.2″ of rain, we’re on “STORM WATCH 2013”! When the Santa Anas blow, you’ll get a news van taking pictures and doing live shots from every downed tree in the county. The bigger, the better. If lanes are blocked or a car gets crushed, you’ll have seven or eight news vans.

The weather patterns are shifting again. By Thursday we’re supposed to be back to “Sunny & 75” for a few days. The Chamber of Commerce will taunt everyone in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago who have a foot of snow and sub-zero temperatures.  The Rose Parade committee will get back to building floats and putting up grandstands for our annual New Year’s Day taunt advertising parade and football game. The surfers will get back to surfing and the snowboarders will get back to snowboarding.

And we’ll all start waiting for the next “natural disaster” — the one that’s just known as “weather” in the rest of the world.