Left-Coast weather continues to be the closest-biggest big news item of this weekend as a massive, wet storm continues unchecked: ‘“The heaviest main band of the rain looks to stall now over L.A. County,” meteorologist Ryan Kittell of the National Weather Service office for Los Angeles said at a briefing Sunday. “That’s a lot of water, people. I mean, that’s a lot. We’re expecting a lot of freeway flooding and road flooding, road closures. Many parked cars will be flooded … especially in low-lying areas of neighborhoods.”‘
Although we here in the San Joaquin portion of the Central Valley aren’t catching the full brunt of this latest system, we did get some fairly-heavy rainfall in the late morning/early afternoon, and now at near-about dark wind can be easily heard billowing outside, flushing through the tress and bushes. No rain, however, at least maybe for a while.
And similar to a lot of other shit, weather is local — here’s my area of environmental interest:
Here the radar forecast for this afternoon and evening for Central California including the San Joaquin Valley and Sierra Nevada. #cawx #radar pic.twitter.com/5eOpWOwl4A
— NWS Hanford (@NWSHanford) February 4, 2024
Meteorologist Ryan Kittell once again: ‘The“ core of the low pressure system is very deep, and it’s moving very slowly and it’s very close to us … And that’s why we have those very strong winds. And the slow nature of it is really giving us the highest rainfall totals and the flooding risk.”‘
And no surprise:
Per https://t.co/eNnIXlbAP5, more than 550,000 customers (equating to around 1,375,000 people by my math) are now experiencing wind-related outages in California–and these numbers are rapidly increasing as winds escalate across SF Bay Area and Central Valley. #CAwx pic.twitter.com/zCMwxJl9pT
— Dr. Daniel Swain (@Weather_West) February 5, 2024
So far so good for us here regarding power outages — we’re fairly secure in the past in such situations and we don’t get the heavy storm impacts like the coast does, which makes it a little easier to handle. We’ve had outages before, but not so widespread and dramatic as the LA/Central Coast areas.
I’ve another visit to Fresno VA this coming Thursday, and according to all the weather forecasts I’ve seen, the storm is supposed to somewhat be finished by then, which maybe could make for a not-too-bad-of-a-trip, though, experiencing any kind of anxiety is my calling card/default state. Last Thursday’s trip (posted about it here) turned out to be not bad at all, even saw some sunshine.
So Garbage might be just about right closing us out here:
Wind and rain, or not, yet here we are once again…:
(Illustration out front: ‘A Break in Reality,’ by Xetobyte, found here.)