Tsunami on the 405

“A Fierce Storm Parks Over L.A. Area,” read the lead story in the Los Angeles Times yesterday. I liked the use of that word, park, to make it sound like some average thing everyone does all the time in L.A. However, according to our mayor, Karen Bass, this is not your usual parking job. On Sunday, she held a news conference to let us know that the storm was “a serious weather event. This has the potential to be a historic storm—severe winds, thunderstorms, and even brief tornadoes.”

I shrugged, I admit. Bad weather in L.A. is so rare that all forms of it, all deviations from perky sunshine, suggest apocalypse to Californians. But I’m from what Californians call “back East,” where storms arrive on whipping winds that shoulder towering, anvil-shaped cumulus clouds across the sky and darken the summer days, threatening to strike mortals below with angry-god force. They rumble and move in without hesitation and pour down on you with unquestionabl...
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