Hurricane Hilary A Real Threat To L.A.

[erik]

For those who might not know--Southern California could be experiencing the landfall of a tropical cyclone for only the second time since 1939 on Sunday night and Monday.

Hilary, the eighth named tropical cyclone of the season in the Pacific, is now a Category 1 hurricane churning in the super-warm waters off of Mazatlan as of this writing, with winds of over 80 miles per hour, and is moving north-northwest along the Mexican coastline. By this time tomorrow, it is predicted to be a major Category 3 or 4 storm, with winds well over 100 miles per hour. It will likely lose a fair amount of its strength as it moves north over cooler waters; but by Sunday night, it will still be a Tropical Storm, with winds of 45 miles per hour around its eye wall, and it is predicted to make landfall on the Southern California coastline. We are looking at an unbelievable amount of rain, possibly four to six inches, which is 100 times what we would normally get in August, high winds, violent thunderstorms, a fair amount of beach erosion and coastal flooding, and certainly flooding in the deserts.

Those of us on the board who live out here in SoCal, present company included, may very well find ourselves busy Sunday night into Monday.

Watch this space.

[MokyWI]

So was it as bad as you thought it was going to be? I guess that depends on the area you live in. The homeless people must of had a rough time, especially if they didn’t make it to a shelter in time.
Hurricane season in Florida is about ready to start. They were predicting a quiet season for Florida, but that was back in the spring before Florida had 100’ ocean water surface temps for most of the summer. High ocean surface temps are a major driving force for hurricanes from that direction in September/October.

[erik]

Hilary was as advertised, a very sizeable storm, though much more of a rainmaker than anything else. We did have winds of up to 50 miles per hour in places, but it was the enormous amount of rain that cascaded down for all of Sunday and part of Monday.

We here in Pasadena had our single wettest August day on record, with nearly six inches falling, causing some urban and street flooding; and those areas of Southern California that had been burned by wildfires saw a large amount of rock, debris, and mud flows, especially in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, where as much as 10-12 inches fell. Death Valley itself managed to get three years worth of average rainfall from this one storm (this being a place that has seen the temperature climb to 130 degrees on at least five days this summer). And Palm Springs saw more rain come from Hilary than it would in an average two-year stretch, with many streets and highways, including nearby Interstate 10, flooded and made temporarily impassible.

So yes, it was a very big deal, as at least one person may have perished in one of the landslides in the San Bernardino Mountains. But our region has survived the first tropical storm to hit Southern California since 1939.