Notice not a lot of folks saying this is sooooooo unusual. I remember hearing of California mudslides for years.
My entire life even.
I’m white, so remembering is probably racist...
Every damn year I lived in LA there would be a 2 week monsoon that led to Mudslides.
It is not unusual. It is not even close to unusual.
Sadly, young adults today are overgrown children with Tik-Tok length memories.
The “atmospheric river” flows through CA every decade or so and dumps a crap-ton of water.
I wouldn’t expect millennials to know but there’s no excuse for someone as old as Ellen.
I grew up in California. Fires and mudlsides were annual events. Like snowstorms in the Rockies, or wet monsoons in Southern Asia.
Yes, it seems to me that in March 1969 it rained hard for 30+ straight days in the Los Angeles basin. Growing up California flood or fire stories were a staple year around.
I was transferred back in 1978, that year it was flooding because of a hurricane.
We left there for San Diego in 1982. It had flooded earlier that year.
It is not an uncommon occurrence there.
John Steinbeck wrote about it in "To A God Unknown." An extended New England family arrives in California around the 1880s or maybe 1890s and prospers enormously because the torrential rains made everything grow. Their crops and herds grew and grew and they got rich. Then the drought years hit a few years later, ruined everything they had built, and the family fell apart.
It's a common tale where people emigrate to California thinking the climate will be like what they knew at home in the East, but then reality intrudes. People learn that most years you get decent rain November to April, some years it is torrential from October to May, and in many years there's hardly any rainfall in the fall, winter or spring.
Since I arrived in CA in 1973, I've seen four or five epic CA rainy seasons like 2022-2023. Younger people without much life experience always think they are the first to experience California dry years or epic wet years.