You can’t say it didn’t get your attention, that June lightning storm, thousands upon thousands of seismically intense strikes across Los Angeles. One of them killed a Pico Rivera woman out walking her two dogs. A TV news story shared the odds of being struck by lightning in an eight-decade life: one in 15,300.
For 150 years, L.A. has drunk its own climate-PR Kool-Aid: Temperate! Balmy! A garden! A paradise! Sunshine 730 days a year!
Mostly true — almost always true. No argument here.
But L.A. can be a weather pinball machine: a thing of beauty in repose, but flip the “on” switch, and pow, bang, ding-ding-ding — weather cacophony, more often than you might realize.
As “Los Angeles in the 1930s: the WPA Guide to the City of Angels” put it lyrically — so lyrically, in fact, that you can tell it was written by artists and not bureaucrats — Southern California packs a small nation’s worth of landscape into a few thousand square miles. “It is a region where rugged mountains, cleft by deep gorges, tower in peaks 10,000 feet above sea level; a region of forests and wide deserts, of rolling foothills, fertile valleys, and seasonal rivers that sweep to the sea; a region with craggy shores, strands, capes, bays, and verdant islands washed by the Pacific ocean.”
With all those beaches and oceanfront cliffs, high and low deserts, mountaintops and mountain passes and pop-up rivers — at least a half-dozen microclimates’ worth — turbulent weather can be a surprise, but it shouldn’t be a shock. Harry P. Bailey’s foundational 1966 book “The Climate of Southern California” figures that all this “imported” weather — the winds and rains and thunder and lightning from desert air and cold-origin air and ocean air — brings to Los Angeles “a far greater variety of weather types than would be expected from purely local circumstances.”
So if UCLA and USC really want to join the Big Ten, they can say, with technical veracity, “Hey, Icy Rust Belt guys, we have snow too!”
But not often, and not much. Not since January 1962 has real snow landed and stuck like an Olympic gymnast in the heart of L.A., but as recently as February 2019, there was a Twitter flurry over snow flurries in Malibu and Northridge and a few other spots.
A temperate climate has been more than a selling point for Southern California; it’s been practically a dogma, tediously pleasant weather marketed with a snake-oil hard-sell.
In his poem “New Hampshire,” Robert Frost writes of encountering people from other states. “I met a Californian who would/Talk California – a state so blessed/He said, in climate, none had ever died there/A natural death.…”
Bob Hope, a native of bleary London who golfed in the eternal sunshine of our spotless greens, maintained files of jokes about contrarian California weather. The actor Monty Woolley was the originator of the quip that only in Southern California could you freeze to death under a blooming rose bush.
When you make a huge deal — as Southern California has — out of no-drama weather, then you get a big dose of something else, like that booming, crackling June thunderstorm, it seems more alarming than it would if we just acknowledged that such weather happens and isn’t always “freak.”
Over and over, The Times has used the word “freak” about weather that defies the Chamber of Commerce storyline, like its July 1918 account of “the freakiest storm that has visited California in more than 20 years.” It was a lightning storm that set fire to oil storage tanks in El Segundo and split an 80-foot pine in Pasadena — dramatic in its effect on humans, sure, but as a storm,…
Read More: Lightning, killer floods and even snow: The real L.A story has weather drama