October 20, 2004

• It’s raining. It’s been raining since noon yesterday, and hasn’t let up. The beginning was Saturday night’s steady showers, which lasted well into Sunday morning. I noted then that these were  “sort of California rain, probably won’t last too long” in Sat. night’s blog entry. I was wrong. The news reports I have read tell me we haven’t had rain since April 2004, but a straw poll taken at work tells me that most people, including me, remember that it did rain a little in early summer. Might have been too slight to “register” in inches, but we get inclement weather so rarely out here that when the rain falls, everybody remembers. We can especially remember in 1992 when the rains fell steadily for two days, and parts of Long Beach got so flooded that people died in their cars of carbon monoxide poisoning. I’m not kidding, either. My girlfriend Pat had a four wheel drive Chevy Blazer, and driving some streets in Long Beach had her freaked because the water line on Spring Street was up to the bottom of the door. Some of the cars were nearly submerged. Lakes of water came up to the doorways of some of the homes six miles inland. (Long Beach, as the name implies, is on the Pacific Ocean, so we’re at sea level here.) A few years later, when I first lived in the house I now live in, located in Lomita, which is built on a concrete slab with no “basement” or foundation, the water soaked up the floorboards into my bedroom, soaking the carpet. I checked this morning for dampness in the same spots, and so far, everything’s okay.

  
  

  When the latest storm began yesterday at lunch, some of my workmates were joking about our building, which has some leaks. Our chief engineer actually cleaned his office yesterday, moving his computer out of harm’s way, where it leaked last year, and good thing he did, because this morning our inside salesman, who was first in the building at 5:30am, noted that leaks were pretty much in the same places. I left the house a half hour early this morning, but got into work a half hour later, because the street I usually take to get to work (a 15 mile stretch) was barricaded because of flooding. Some of the freeways even had lanes blocked for the same reason.

  
  

  At least there haven’t been winds. When that happens, one has to maneuver around the downed tree branches, and sometimes the power goes out in selected areas of town, when branches fall across the power lines. I’m always glad I get in to work early in the morning, before the traffic gets bad, because most people in SoCal don’t know how to drive in inclement weather, choosing to go too fast or slow, and of course you can’t see the dividers on the highways, and people don’t tend to remember that with slick brakes mixed with slick streets cars don’t stop as quickly as when things are dry.

  
  

  I drive a convertible, so I had to bring some towels with me this morning, a precaution I exercise every winter. It doesn’t exactly “rain inside the car” but no matter how much weather stripping is on the windows, water leaks into the car, soaks the seats, and anyone who is sitting in them. I had to drape a towel over my left leg, and cover my bucket seat which was soaked through from the night’s tally.

  
  

  Now I’m sitting comfortably at work, listening to the drip drip drip of the water falling into a plastic trash can in the center of the conference room outside my office. At one point during the night last night, I awoke from a “nightmare” where I actually thought it was raining inside my bedroom. In one of those “half awake half asleep” states, I dreamed I was lying in my bed with the covers pulled over my head, and water was dripping on the comforter. I’m glad it was only a dream, but like all dreams, there was a basis for this in reality. When I lived with my friend Bob and Mike in the “frat house” as I called it in the late 80s, we had a steady rain one season after one of the sporadic earthquakes had split the ceiling in my bedroom. Water ran down a vent spout in the roof of the house, and then followed the cracks, and leaked into my bedroom, and I did awake in the middle of the night to find it raining in my room. I eventually had to crawl into the attic and find a way, with plastic sheeting, to reroute the leak.

  
  

  The weather service notes that this storm will last into tomorrow. After a while of soaking, the water has nowhere to go, and then flash floods occur. There were flash flood warnings going into work this morning. There might even be thunderstorms this afternoon, which is really rare in this part of the country. But one good thing, this will probably curb the late fire season, which destroyed so much property and left so many people homeless last year. Our CEO was in fear of losing his mountain cabin at Lake Arrowhead last year about this time, but the fires were kept to one side of the lake. There are a lot less trees in the forest this year because of the fires. Of course heavy rains bring other dangers, like mudslides, which destroy homes as well. I at least live in an area which is mainly bedrock, next to the Palos Verdes peninsula, so there is not chance of any mudslides near my home.

  
  

  And that’s the weather in Sunny Southern California this morning. I think I’ll forgo my daily walk around the business park.  (Some good news for me, however, I do get to pick up my videocamera tonight so will be able to go on a Photography Expedition this weekend. That is if it dries out some.)

  • 9:32 am
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