Propaganda Experts Tell us that California Drought is Improving
re: mosquito
re: Drought Be Gone — California Rain and Snow Shock and Awe
UPDATE March 14: a few days of 64° weather and a spectacularly nice day (first in two months good for a bike ride!) yesterday following the 4 inches (!) of rain last week that 2/3 filled my wheelbarrow... started raining gently last night but now the wind is going violent... I feel cheated because the rain is supposed to be only modest and I was rooting for another "river".
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It just keeps raining. Growth of my California Buckeye trees is a month behind schedule, even though some leafed-out in early January during a brief warm spell. The grass is healthy but unusually short—two months of the coldest winter in many years has retarded its growth. Not bitter cold as in the midwest, but cold for my place. A total PITA winter enough for a $310 monthly natural gas bill using it sparingly. Must be that global warming thing.
Tigger doesn’t care much for rain but keeps doing his “farm cat” job as often as the rain allows, doubling up on gophers and rats on lucky days. A man’s job to clean up, so say my wife and daughters.
The soil everywhere is soaked to standing pools, rainforest-grade. An earthquake now and for the next 6 months would be devastating in places with unstable slopes. The Carrizo Plain National Monument presumably will have a superbloom within a month, but conditions in Death Valley have not been come together, in spite of a ton of precipitation.
Down in Pajaro CA a levee broke** and those poor 2000 folks or so are safe but what a mess. Down in Soquel the usually itsy bitsy creek took out the main bridge quite decisively. Here in California we seem to have relatively minor issues compared to hand-of-god tornado/hurricane areas of the country. I am grateful for a new roof and a house-siting that would require a Noah-grade flood to worry about rain.
Reservoirs are at very healthy levels, but the drought is not yet over according to “experts”—the same kind of duplicitous jackasses we’ve had to deal with in every other area of life for years now. When a May heat wave hits, that 600 to 800 inches of snowfall* (unprecedented in my lifetime?) will have reservoir spillways thundering, and might disappear many a roadway in some places. Or take out a dam here and there as almost happened at Oroville a few years back.
So why do I say “propaganda experts”? Because the situation on the ground is as wet as can possibly be (as in all of recorded history), with saturated ground and massive snowpack. To average this hyper-deluge year together with prior dry years even as the mountains groan under the burden is ludicrous—it’s an arbitrary artificial construct that bears no relation to reality. The drought is over. A drought is over when precipitation vastly exceeds average—it is not over only when the average of several years makes up for all prior years—an asinine construct. It would be like filling up your empty gas tank, then claiming it is not full, because it was nearly empty the past 3 days.
Heading to the mountains or even desert remains a sketchy idea, what with rain, rain, rain which becomes snow, snow, snow in the passes and mud in the desert. Many Death Valley roads are heavily damaged. That might be a good thing, keeping visitor count down. But beware deadly flash floods, but those usually are August. This year... who knows.
* Mammoth Mountain in the Eastern Sierra will have had over 600 inches of snow by tonight (50 feet = ~15 meters), and probably 650 inches by Wednesday. Will it hit 700/800/1000 inches? Precipitation has shown no signs of abating.
** Other things are starting to break too—broken banks like SVB, but customer money was well spent on a diverse workforce at a bank lacking a CRI (chief risk officer) for nearly a year. Inexorable progress towards societal collapse, shades of Atlas Shrugged. The claimed main cause of the failure was risk management incompetence (long term notes vs huge rises in interest rates). Management incompetence and narcissism rises as the square of DEI+ESG, so here are a few good laughs about the truth of it.
Below, a french drain steadily draws down the puddle, which can grown much larger. There is just so much water that everything is soggy. But the garlic is making progress and the buckeye trees are (a month late) leafing out slowly.
iPhone 7 Plus + iPhone 7 Plus 4.0 mm f/1.8 @ 28mm equiv (4mm) ENV: altitude 506 ft / 154 m
[low-res image for bot]
This minor situation is nonetheless telling of the general damage the seasonal rains have wrought—a poorly-constructed trail turned into a creek.
iPhone 7 Plus + iPhone 7 Plus 4.0 mm f/1.8 @ 28mm equiv (4mm) ENV: altitude 526 ft / 160 m
[low-res image for bot]
