Commentary: The approaching El Nio is scary, but L.A.'s starred in this horror movie before
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Set us as preferred El Niño is coming for us.It’s out there over the Pacific Ocean, waiting.Muscling up for the move.It’s come this way before, and it overstayed its welcome.
At intervals of 20 years and sometimes more often, it has lashed and splashed us, turned our living rooms into muddy aquariums, swept away our cars and houses, and sometimes hundreds of Angelenos.So, when Sepulveda Boulevard becomes the Sepulveda River in a few months, and the TV news reporters pull on those yellow rain slickers for “Stormwatch ‘26,” remember that L.A.has starred in this movie before.El Niño’s nastiest modern visit was on March 2, 1938, when a pair of storms hit the city of L.A.
with 5.88 inches of rain in 24 hours.It rampaged for several days, and flooded the basin so devastatingly that the Oscars, scheduled for March 3, had to be postponed for a week because so many stars and filmmakers were marooned up in the canyons and on their ranches in the San Fernando Valley.
More on death and destruction later.We live in a perfect geological machine for flooding.The thousands of square miles of mountain watershed around us, the San Gabriels and the San Bernardinos, are as steep as roller coasters, and the rain funnels off them in tumults.
The one-day rainfall record in California, and the fourth highest ever in the nation, landed in the San Gabriels on Jan.22, 1943, a couple of miles southeast of Mt.
Wilson: 25.83 inches in 24 hours — 2 feet in one day.Los Angeles is a complex place.Luckily, there's someone who can provide context, history and culture.
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