Passing Through The Storm

We’re fine. In our particular neighborhood we haven’t had anything particularly threatening going on, fortunately. Other folks in other areas have been less fortunate, but overall, so far, it seems as if the impacts have been within reason. I haven’t heard of any fatalities or serious injuries due to the storm beyond a couple of traffic accidents probably caused in part by the rain – but that happens any time it rains in SoCal.

I got going early this morning and went out to get our weekly groceries and our Sunday breakfast. It was just starting to rain here, even though it had been raining for several hours further south in Long Beach, Orange County, San Diego, and Mexico.

By late afternoon it had started raining much harder and the wind had come up, but again, nothing disasterous. We got a bit over two inches of rain so far (it’s still raining and expected to continue for the next 10-12 hours) and we saw winds in the 20-25 mph range, but none of the 50-80 mph gusts that were possible. No power outages. A few flooded intersections around town, but we weren’t going out! The National Weather Service said “Stay!” and I did my best golden retriever imitation and stayed!

Of course, in the middle of all of this there was that magnitude 5.1 earthquake about fourty miles from us that rattled me from side to side for about ten seconds and shook up some stuff on the shelves behind me. Who had that on their SoCal Disaster Sunday bingo card?

Meanwhile, there’s street flooding and swift water rescues going on out in Ventura, some very near Camarillo Airport where I’ve spent so much time over the last few years with the CAF SoCal Wing. Today was supposed to be the second day of the Wings Over Camarillo airshow out there (do a search, there are a dozen more posts full of pictures over the years from that show), but that got cancelled last night. Out in the desert and in particular around Death Valley National Park there was some massive flash flooding, but the park had been evacuated over the weekend so no word of any casualties. It might just have the park closed for repairs for a while.

All in all, it could have been a lot worse. And while it still is unstable out there and could still be worse tonight, I think the odds are that SoCal dodged a bullet on this one. I just doubt that it’s going to be another 84 years before it happens again.