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From ages 10 through 19 I lived in the hot, humid, mosquito-infested state of Florida. During those nine years, I experienced one hurricane, David, that passed directly over my town. The eye passed over my house, so I got the full show of winds from one direction, a fast and sudden lull to calm and clear, then the wall of wind returning from the opposite direction. David had been a lethal storm, but by the time it reached my home it had become a baby of a hurricane, barely reaching Category 2, but it was sufficient enough that I felt no curiosity to see a stronger storm for myself. After a brief stint in the United States Navy, a career that I was not suited for at all, I moved to San Diego, California, which has been my home ever since.
California boasts its own set of natural disasters to frighten and terrify its population with, chiefly earthquakes and wildfires, both of which I have had some experience with. I commented yesterday about watching the wall of a Denny’s ripple with waves that were like wind-driven water. In the early ’90s a wildfire in the eastern reaches of the county grew so large and so destructive that the sky turned red with smoke and ash, prompting a friend to comment that he suspected that was what it was like living in Mordor.
But do you know what I did not expect at all from Southern California?
A hurricane.
Currently off the western coast of Mexico, Hurricane Rachel spins harmlessly out over the waters of the Pacific. This is the time of the year when tropical storms, cyclones, and hurricanes form over the usually peaceful Pacific Ocean. Jet streams and coriolis forces bend the tracks of these eastern Pacific storms to the west so that they expend their energies usually far from shore, though occasionally Hawaii feels the forces of such a storm. If the storm develops further south, the coasts of Central and South America are in the path of these systems, but more often it is the Atlantic storms that threaten.
Rachel, a smallish hurricane, is currently west of the tip of Baja California. Due to a strange, unlikely, and bizarre set of weather conditions, partially driven by this year’s enormous El Niño, the storm is expected to turn North and East, driving towards the West Coast. As it crosses the relatively cooler waters closer to land, the experts expect it to degrade from a hurricane, sustained winds of 74 miles per hour or more, to a tropical storm, winds of 39 miles per hour or greater.
The projected cone of the storm’s track indicates that its landfall could be south, in Baja California, or as far north as Orange County or San Diego. If it takes this more northerly track, Rachel is expected to make landfall late Saturday evening or early Sunday morning.
My friends, San Diego is not built for hurricanes or tropical storms, or even a lesser tropical depression. In San Diego, the trifling little rains that Floridians experience nearly every afternoon during the summer closes roads and knocks out traffic lights. There are roads near my home here in Mission Valley that have gates installed because mild California storms cause the San Diego River to escape its banks and flood out the streets, forcing their closure. This town is not prepared for sustained high winds and heavy rainfall.
Fortunately, I reside atop a high hill overlooking the Eastern end of Mission Valley, and as such my home, is not subject to flooding, but everything below me is going to have a rough time of it if Rachel comes.
I had a friend, a San Diego native, as rare as that beast is, who expressed more than once that he would have loved to have seen a hurricane come to this city. He passed away far too young two years ago, but if there is an afterlife, and I do not believe that there is, he’s watching with amusement.
