Surfing the streets of Long Beach ☔️ pic.twitter.com/ao5mbx1Dah
— Kyle Farmer (@kyle_farmer15) January 23, 2017
By now, you’ve probably heard about the crazy amount of rain sweeping across the west coast of the United States. Records are being broken, people are dying, mud is sliding, roads are closed, cars are washing away, concrete ships are being bashed by massive waves, and it is general mayhem. Right now, I’m in Mexico, and I’ve just closed a book called We Are Unprepared, a novel about massive storms that sweep the East Coast of the US and how small communities might react. Strange, isn’t it?
I’m far from the soggy blanket that’s covering my little house in the hills for the next few days, but, like any good Los Angeles transplant, I get daily text messages alerting me to traffic advisories. “Latigo Canyon closed due to mudslide,” they read. “Topanga Canyon closed to flooding/PCH closed both ways,” etc. My aunt just wrote me an email letting me know that a giant oak fell where my truck is usually parked, but that my neighbor had borrowed it and parked it down the street at another neighbor’s place. Shit, as they say, is hitting the fan, and we are unprepared.
The video you see above is shot in Long Beach, California, by Kyle Farmer (Twitter here!) where the fire department reported it just had its heaviest rainfall in a day. “Record rainfall of 3.87″ was set at the LB Airport today,” they tweeted on Sunday. “This rainfall sets an all-time record for LGB. Previous record was 3.75″ in 1995.” Winter Storm Leo is pushing east now, but only after smashing California so hard the Governor declared a state of emergency.
