Nature has bitten back with a vengeance. More than two weeks on from the big storm and Pasadena’s clear up effort continues. More than 75,000 homes were without power for five days. Ten days later there were still houses waiting to be re-connected and complaints about inefficient utility companies and lack lustre responses abound.
Pasadena’s Rose Bowl stadium has been designated as the tree recycling depot – there will certainly be no shortage of logs for those winter fires and the Southern Californian mulch mountain is growing daily. Re-cycling is not a particularly popular past-time in the US and there is a noticeable absence of homeowners loading up their own cars with tree debris – they prefer instead to sweep it out into the road where it remains in large mounds presumably awaiting collection by the city council or the posse of Mexican gardeners.
This doesn’t altogether surprise me – here in affluent Pasadena very few homeowners will ever cut their own grass, wash their own car or clean their own loo. Hardly surprising then that there is a distinct lack of residents gathering up their own leaves.
It also appears to be perfectly acceptable here to leave your rubbish out on the street and rely on someone else to cart it way. I regularly see abandoned three piece suites, the odd chest of drawers or a box of old books or children’s toys out on the sidewalk – we’d call that fly tipping in the UK and would receive a hefty fine. Here you just dump your stuff and hope that someone else will walk off with it. Rather surprisingly it’s a system that does actually work – as long as you don’t mind your neighbourhood looking like a junk yard for a few days.
It also appears to be perfectly acceptable here to leave your rubbish out on the street and rely on someone else to cart it way. I regularly see abandoned three piece suites, the odd chest of drawers or a box of old books or children’s toys out on the sidewalk – we’d call that fly tipping in the UK and would receive a hefty fine. Here you just dump your stuff and hope that someone else will walk off with it. Rather surprisingly it’s a system that does actually work – as long as you don’t mind your neighbourhood looking like a junk yard for a few days.
Driving has become even more of a hazard than usual. Palm tree fronds and fallen branches still litter many roads and new chicanes appear daily around the accumulating garden waste burial mounds. Traffic signals and street lamps are still down. Major road junctions are functioning as chaotic twelve way stops and many drivers appear to have lost that rather elusive American common sense gene altogether. Rather than co-operating in an orderly fashion most of these junctions are complete free-for-alls with accidents occurring on a daily basis. So even if you were lucky enough to avoid being hit by a falling tree, there is a every chance now you will be hit by another car.
All this chaos is just the result of one night of heavy wind. I don’t know if it was simply a question of being taken unawares, a lack of co-ordination, or even lack of co-operation but the clear up is not going well. Heaven help California when there really is a big disaster – like an earthquake. Ever since we arrived here and experienced our first minor earth tremor public service adverts have regularly appeared on TV reminding us to be prepared for the BIG ONE and to make sure we have our emergency disaster kit to hand - bottled water, dried food, batteries, torch, urgent medical supplies. Maybe a rake, wheelbarrow and large dose of community spirit would be good things to have on standby too.
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