When It Rains

Despite what you might think, it isn't just us British who are obsessed with the weather.  These Californians can be pretty intense about it too.  I never thought I'd be sat in California blogging about the weather - or at least not wet weather - but strangely enough, since we arrived here Los Angeles has had one of its wettest years on record, and this week we've had an almost unheard of seven continuous days of rain. Those palm trees and mountains don't look so good when they are shrouded in grey. It does nothing for my depression - last winter's episode of extreme jigsaw puzzling is not something I ever want to have to go through again.  I think in the UK we're just so geared up for the wet weather we just get on with it - it rarely makes a difference to our day.  When it rains here in LA all hell is let loose.  A little bit of drizzle is fine - even Californians can cope with that, okay maybe the roads get a bit slippy and people don't drive too well, but they don't drive too well at the best of times.  But when it pours with rain as it has done this year, then the whole nature of the place changes.  Imagine Noah and his ark and the rising tide.  That's LA.

These are not people who have grown up driving on a wet surface or who are even used to putting their windscreen wipers on.  Houses here are not designed to cope with rain water,  older homes don't even have gutters and drain pipes, streets do not have regular drains every 25 yards.  Buildings that do have  downpipes will  leave them draining to soakaways which are not always necessarily immediately below the end of the pipe.  Imagine a heavy downpour onto a very dry surface.  It doesn't soak away.  It stays.

Our first house had three soakaways sunk into the middle of the patio - small metal grills over a hole no more than 3" diameter.  All the downpipes from the house emptied straight out onto the patio, but strategically placed plastic trays directed the flow towards the soakaways.  This worked fine on most days - a bit of light drizzle and the water would just trickle out of the end of the pipe and would almost have evaporated before it reached the soakaway.  Absolutely useless in a deluge.

There were a couple of days earlier in the year when I honestly thought the house was about to flood.  The pool water was rising - we were within millimeters of having our own infinity pool, the patio was completely underwater and the soakaways were blocked.  Water was gushing down the street in a raging river towards the one large storm drain at the end of the road.  At the entrance to the drain, a huge lake was being created with the sheer volume of water.

I'm afraid it was another of those "why do they do that?" moments - why build roads without adequate drainage? Why build a house without proper drain pipes? Is that just me? Do they really like sloshing about in all this water?  Perhaps it's like the UK with the "snow thing" - a couple of inches of snow and everything grinds to a halt - why hasn't every local council invested in a fleet of snowploughs to unblock all the roads? Well in the UK you can wait 10 years between snow flurries.  Every year here it will rain at some stage - this isn't the Sahara Desert. Up in the foothills of the mountains, not too far from us, mudslides occur.  A series of forest fires has stripped the vegetation from the mountainside so there is nothing to keep the soil back, and when it rains, the water carries everything downstream with it - mud, gravel, rocks.  Whole houses are destroyed. But it happens every year.

On the plus side of course all this rain did wonders for the ski resorts up in the mountains where the colder air transforms the wet stuff into snow.  It was a bumper year for winter sports and presumably umbrella, raincoat and wellington boot sales.  Think of the increase in sales tax the state will have made - they could put that to improving drainage on the roads, ready for next year's downpour.....