Speaking of the weather:
I've heard the drought situation in California has really dropped from dangerous levels to more manageable now. Will any of these three storms hit areas that still really need water?
Hi, Chuck, well...in an article I read today there was this sentence, "Drought conditions persist in Southern California, but in the north, it's near over, for now anyway.
Caption for this photo: Northern California has been
inundated with rain and snow, which is flooding some
rivers and filling basins that have been dry for years.
Northern California benefitted from El Nino last winter whereas Southern California got none which
puzzled all the meteorologists. The year after an El Nino year there's usually a La Nina which was
worrying them because that would usually mean a dry winter. But Southern California has been
getting rain this winter, in fact we're above the average this year already, which still isn't what
most of you in other parts of the country would think was a lot. And what they call "the pineapple
express" is coming this week. That's a series of conditions when water from around Hawaii in the
Pacific is brought up into the atmosphere and carried to the West Coast in a series of storms. I read
that the amount of water these storms carry can be more than contained in the entire Mississippi river!
So it is certainly helping SoCal and the rest of California, but the state announced Tuesday they are
keeping the conservation rules in place and will re-evaluate them later in the year.
The worry in SoCal this week is that because of the 7 years we've had no rain, all the plants and
trees and whatever that haven't been getting much water don't have a good hold on the soil with
their root systems, so excessive rain can just saturate it quickly and the earth will give way. We
already had someone's backyard topple down a hill into Laurel Canyon Blvd. and cause the road
to be closed for several days. (That's the winding road that connects West Hollywood to the valley
(Studio City). Mario Lopez tweeted pictures of his backyard caving in from somewhere up there,
too. Plus, very few people have checked all their rain gutters for years. When we had a good rain
recently we discovered our apartment building's system quickly got clogged with dirt and mud.
Since it has been so rare for years, I am loving it, though!
