By: Angelina Feliciano
California experiences surprising blizzard warnings as the Weather Service in Los Angeles had warnings of “life threatening flash flooding of creeks and streams, burn scars, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses”
During the month of February California experienced many cold days where many students from Neuwirth were freezing outside after-school and we thought it couldn’t get colder but it became much worse. On the third week of February, the weather app informed people that it would be raining from Thursday night to Saturday and would continue again on Monday-Wednesday but not as much these three days. Some people might’ve thought that this was something nice especially since California is known to always be hot. I even remember being somewhat excited about the rain but soon regretted it.
As soon as the rain started there was an increase in reports of a Blizzard warning. The weekend continued with inches of rain as stated by the Washington Post, “Up to 7 inches of rain had fallen in some parts of Los Angeles County”, and in some areas, there was thunder which some people were not expecting. A student from Neuwirth even said, “I wasn’t expecting it to rain this hard or there to even be thunder at all so it was a bit scary”.
In some places, the experience was very different because instead of rain it snowed in some parts of California. It snowed in places like San Bernardino County, Cascade Mountains, and many other mountains which experienced groundbreaking inches of snow. According to NPR, there was “snowfall down to elevations as low as 1,000 feet (305 meters)”. This caused places like the Grapevine to be shut down on Friday early in the morning until around 5 pm that day. I remember my dad even told me he couldn’t go to work that day since they closed the Grapevine which he needs to pass in order to get to his work in Valencia. With the temperature continuing to drop the Grapevine had to once again be closed on Saturday. I thought the snow couldn’t get worse but I was proven wrong yet again as a friend who lives in San Bernardino sent me a video of it snowing where he lived. This shocked me especially since San Bernadino is about an hour away from LA and it was crazy to think it was snowing in places close to us. For San Bernardino, things got much worse, especially in the mountains. According to the Los Angeles Times, the highways were closed as soon as the storm dropped and more than “5 feet of snow” dropped. This storm caused many residents to be stranded “at the bottom of the mountains while other people who rode out the storms in their homes were snowed in”. On the news, they talked about how some people weren’t able to get gas because the gas stations didn’t have any so this caused a state of emergency to be declared in San Bernardino County.
This has been something really shocking for many people including myself. I never thought this storm was going to be as bad as it has been, which makes me wonder if this is normal, especially since it hasn’t snowed in some places in California since the late 1900s.
You might be asking yourself, is this normal? It sure doesn’t seem normal. Well, you’re right, it is an excessive amount of rain compared to “normal” rainfall in Los Angeles. According to LAAlmanac.com, the amount of rainfall we have received so far is around 20 inches of rain., which is way above (150% more) the normal 13 inches of rain we receive in a year. It’s crazy to think about how much it’s increased, and what could be next. This shows how climate change is a very serious thing that needs to be addressed as it’s changing the way the climate is acting by a significant amount. I have started to question myself: what about the drought problem present in Los Angeles? Is there still a drought? What will summer be like this year? Will we get even more rain next year? And perhaps most importantly, do I need to actually buy an umbrella?