The first rain since April. Big, fat, beautiful dark clouds moved in, bringing rain to the region. Call me crazy, but I took photos of the clouds.
It was a day to be celebrated by sitting outside with a glass of wine, listing to the gentle dripping of raindrops in the trees, knowing that soon the hills will wear their green coats again.
The weather report had announced “rain storm to hit West Coast.” Now I, coming from a country which moved Heinrich Heine to exclaim “summer in Germany is but winter painted green” know all about storms. And rain. And winter. As long as no tiles are flying off roofs, it is not a storm. As long as the rain does not continue on for weeks and weeks, there is nothing to worry about. As long as there is no snow and ice, it is not winter.
So, please, weather people, stop exaggerating. Rejoice with everybody else in the fact that the rain season has started and spare us the storm warnings.
Surely glad my daughter moved from Chula Vista. They lived just west of the Lower Otay Reservoir, which is currently being burned up. They’d probably be evacuated by now.
I hope you are doing okay. We’ve been seeing news reports, and the devastation is heartbreaking. Of course, after the fires, if there’s any rain, then there’ll be mudslides. It’s awful.
Karen, it is dreadful. By 11 am today 513,000 people were under mandatory evacuation. That is just the number in San Diego County, but there are fires everywhere here in SoCal, so who knows what the actual number is. I am quite numb by now, it is to much to imagine.
We here in the city are okay and safe, nothing to worry about. But those poor, poor people – it’s just… I am lost for words.
There has to be some way to, if not prevent, at least cut down on the damage the fires do. It seems this happens every year. The number of evacuees is about half the total number of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. And people in 3 states (or more) evacuated because of Katrina. And speaking of trivia, where the number of Katrina evacuees came from is this article on the Katrina diaspora. It’s a very interesting article altogether about the effects of the evacuation a year later.
Actually yes, there are fires every year, but the scale this year is enormous. Everything combined for a perfect storm – the worst drought since 130 years, Santa Ana winds much more forceful than usual and some freak accidents with downed power lines and such which started the Malibu fire and the ones in San Diego.
There you are – what can one do to prevent that?