No joy in Mudville

Some stay dry while others feel the pain: "A gas company worker digs in front of a flattened home on Manistee Drive, where the flash flood caused a gas leak." Photo by Gary Friedman for the Los Angeles Times.

It was a sucker punch: the last rainstorm was the "bad" one, they told us, and this one was supposed to be comparatively meh. Trouble was, the storm parked itself above L.A. and didn't leave until it had dumped up to 3.5 inches of rain in the foothills, or what's left of the foothills after the monster Station Fire.

[T]he damage was worst at the top of the hill in La Cañada Flintridge's Paradise Valley. The rains made good on worst-case-scenario predictions that geologists and emergency officials have been warning about since the Station fire denuded 250 square miles of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Some residents were awakened by water flooding waist-deep into their homes. Two men rescued a bedridden 86-year-old woman trapped in her room, tethered to an oxygen tank, her bed floating in the rising water.

On Manistee Drive, a white single-story home appeared submerged in several feet of dirt, looking as if a giant child had dropped the house in a sand pit.

"The one time they don't evacuate, this happens," said Justin Jesscoat, an Ocean View Boulevard resident whose parked car was swept down the street. [LAT: 'Niagara' of mud hits homes.]

More rain is expected later this week, oy. Mudpocalypse! Mudmaggedon! Meanwhile, up the hill, they're getting ready to do this all over again:

"Too much snow on the roof!!!" Photo by Rosalinde at RIMOFTHEWORLD.net.

Patterns of drought

Dry as dust. Click on photo for a larger view.

In much of California last winter, it just didn't rain. Even when parts of the state are in the middle of a drought cycle, our hills here in SoCal always turn green in the winter -- or they did until last winter. Next-to-no-rain, with all that entails, can be a scary, expensive, miserable thing. [Ask Atlanta.]

Compare this blog's header photo with the photo at the top of the post. Both photos were taken the same day. The ranch in the header photo is twenty miles from the ocean, and as green as you'd expect for its location, but the photo of the farm at the top of the post was taken inland: fewer than twenty miles inland from the ranch in the header. Given the time of year [early May] that land should should look much more like this:

Green as grass.

The pasture above is on Anna Guthrie's place in inland San Diego County, but last spring it was as parched as the ranch at the top of the post.

Was I happy when it poured buckets for the better part of 24 hours last week? I can't begin to tell you how happy. Mudslides and rockslides are a pain, but drought is in an awful category all by itself.

West of Big Bear Lake.

Unreal

This is the real deal, people.

It's raining. Real rain. There are actual puddles. Oh. my. god. I took some pictures -- my hands were kind of shaking.