Los Angeles Times Admits California Has Cyclic Wet-Dry Cycles After Historic Snowpack
Hopefully, the wet cycle will be a long one. It takes a lot of water to put out an EV-fire.
California has been swimming in an atmospheric river to the point the state has a historic-level snowpack.
Drought-weary California is entering February with deeper snowpack than it has seen in four decades, reflecting a healthy boost in the state’s supply of water but also spurring concerns about dryness, flooding and other potential hazards in the months ahead.
Statewide Sierra snowpack was 205% of normal for the date on Wednesday, said officials with the Department of Water Resources during the second snow survey of the season.
Even more promising, snowpack was 128% of its April 1 average, referring to the end-of-season date when snowpack in California is typically at its deepest.
“Our snowpack is off to an incredible start, and it’s exactly what California needs to really help break from our ongoing drought,” DWR snow survey manager Sean de Guzman said. The state’s snowpack is currently outpacing the winter of 1982-83 — “the wettest year on record dating back about 40 years,” he said.
In a shocking move, the Los Angles Times actually published real science related to the wet season that we are experiencing on the West Coast, and allowed real experts to explain the state’s wet-dry seasons are cyclic.
As California emerges from a two-week bout of deadly atmospheric rivers, a number of climate researchers say the recent storms appear to be typical of the intense, periodic rains the state has experienced throughout its history and not the result of global warming.
Although scientists are still studying the size and severity of storms that killed 19 people and caused up to $1 billion in damage, initial assessments suggest the destruction had more to do with California’s historic drought-to-deluge cycles, mountainous topography and aging flood infrastructure than it did with climate-altering greenhouse gasses.
Although the media and some officials were quick to link a series of powerful storms to climate change, researchers interviewed by The Times said they had yet to see evidence of that connection. Instead, the unexpected onslaught of rain and snow after three years of punishing drought appears akin to other major storms that have struck California every decade or more since experts began keeping records in the 1800s.
In light of California’s new regulations prohibiting the sale of fossil-fuel-powered vehicles, we better hope this is a long, wet cycle. We are going to need lots of it to fight electric vehicle battery fires.
A Tesla Model S “spontaneously caught fire” while traveling down a highway in Rancho Cordova, California, prompting firefighters to respond to the scene, officials said.
On Saturday afternoon, crew members from the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District responded to a Tesla that was “engulfed in flames” due to a battery fire, officials said in a tweet.
Video posted by Metro Fire of Sacramento showed firefighters hosing the vehicle down as other cars drove by. Photos of the aftermath of the blaze showed the totally charred front hood of the vehicle.
Firefighters used 6,000 gallons of water to extinguish the flames as two fire engines, a water tender and a ladder truck were called to assist. Crews used jacks to access the underside to extinguish and cool the battery, fire officials said.
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“It takes a lot of water to put out an EV-fire.”
The fire occurs because the lithium ion battery shroud is cracked, permitting atmospheric moisture to come in contact with the metallic lithium, which then spontaneously exothermically reacts, releasing hydrogen gas, which then ignites and burns.
Pouring water onto a lithium ion battery fire is the very, very best thing to accelerate the fire.
Brilliant!
P.S.: for EV fires, firefighters need to use chemical foam, but WTF, nobody told them.
Smokey the Bear said, “Only you can prevent EV fires by driving a gas powered vehicle.”
I wonder why LI isn’t writing about this latest diatribe by Trump against DeSantis. I now regret the two times I voted for Trump. He is a loser and a backstabber. Anyone who disagrees with him is now, in his opinion, a RINO, GOPe, and globalist. How pathetic.
“The real Ron Desantis is a RINO GLOBALIST, who closed quickly down Florida and even its beaches. Loved the Vaccines and wasted big money on ‘Testing.’ How quickly people forget!,” — Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday.
Yes and no.
Would America have been better off under the puttana del diavolo Hillary? I think not.
Is America better off under the demented nasty SOB? Clearly not.
Let’s just do what we can to make DeSantis the 2024 Republican nominee.
Cue the Trump in the Bunker videos.
What this website needs is more Trump/Desantis drama. Really unites the readers and galvanizes us toward productive action to further governance by our shared principles.
Also, LI doesn’t seem to do breaking news. Largely, I enjoy that. It gives the authors a little time to digest some happening and write it up in a way that informs and provides perspective.
Let Trump, DeSantis, and the rest fight it out Thunderdome style. Trump certainly isn’t helping himself lately.
But Trump loves the vaccines. He just got done TELLING us that.
What was “wrong” about the Covid vaccines was not the medical principle.
I remember my mother taking me, age 4, in 1956, and my infant brother to our GP in Brooklyn for the Salk polio vaccine shots. I was hysterical, remembering the syringe being the size of a bicycle pump.
When Salk boarded a commercial flight, the captain would announce his presence, and the entire passenger cabin would erupt in applause; he was the most respected man in America.
What was “wrong” about the Covid vaccines was the legal compulsion, but Democrats always gravitate to force and compulsion.
Credit and blame where appropriate, please.
The same Trump that didn’t have the stones to fire Fauci when it was evident that his plan and advice were garbage..
But, but Trump!1!!! Get help, dude.
The Sacramento river is very muddy which is typical. The diversion canals in town are flowing clear water which means snow melt water; muddy when heavy rains flush soil into creek and river channels.
If you live in NorCal the Tisdale weir is a handy tool to gauge runoff levels before, during and after storms:
Tisdale weir graph: https://www.cnrfc.noaa.gov/graphicalRVF.php?id=TISC1
Oroville and Shasta lake levels: https://oroville.lakesonline.com/Level/
Natural cycle of weather patterns. Building a few more reservoirs to capture the run off and hold the excess for the inevitable drought would make sense. Especially considering water demand in CA cities from population growth over the many decades since the last reservoir was constructed. Eventually the western States will have to acknowledge the limits on the carrying capacity of those areas. The fight between the States and within States for water won’t be pretty.
Moses decided to drop anchor in a desert.
The Israelis have done a pretty good job extracting potable water from the Med.
California could do that too, if they weren’t too busy passing lunatic environmental legislation.
Sure lots of viable solutions that have been rejected b/c reasons. That may appease their ideology but isn’t solving the water shortage. Cities have expanded past the carrying capacity, not just in the west. Atlanta is drawing off water from a reservoir specifically designed to maintain consistent flow downstream through Alabama, Florida and into the Gulf to support commercial/recreational fishing among other things.
Atlanta just took it and now refuses to stop. Lawsuits going back decades over this. Sooner or later cities will be forced to confront the consequences of their failure to plan. The land does have limits and arrogant refusal to approach these limits prudently will someday go past them into catastrophe.
“The land does have limits”
OK, so what limits would you plan, if you were calling the shots?
We have pipelines for natural gas, when blue states don’t prohibit such, and we have pipelines for raw and refined carbon products, when blue states don’t prohibit such, why can’t we have pipelines for water?
I realize water extracted from the Pacific and/or Gulf and/or Atlantic will cost more than when you and I do a rain dance but what is the alternative?
Single child policy?
For starters how about a border wall and interior enforcement of immigration violations. That would remove somewhere between 15 to 30 million people here illegally while making new illegal arrivals more difficult. It would also reduce future population growth.
Cities need to plan how to provide basic services. Water is one. Lots of options. Buy land and create a reservoir to supply it is one. Purchase land for a reservoir and a pipeline, assuming folks want to sell it is fine.
I personally disagree with the use of eminent domain for non local benefits. So using it for a local sewer project is ok but not, IMO, for a pipeline that doesn’t serve a local interest. Let the land be purchased at the price the landowners set or go around unless there isn’t any alternative to the placement.
Cities should begin setting growth limits based on the ability to supply water. If they expect to impose a taking from another area that seems arrogant and exploitive.
Sri sending perfectly good water out to sea via the Sacramento Delta as well.
How “Stop” became “Sri” I’ve no idea.
Remember the William Shatner Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”???
Not only are they not building more reservoirs, they are removing ones that already exist.
California has two modes 1:Drought until the forests all burn. 2:Rain until all the hills slide into the valleys.
Same as it ever was.
There have been wet and dry cycles ever since the first dinosaur laid an egg at the beginning of the Jurassic Era.
We’re having an unusually wet winter, following our unusually wet late summer monsoon season, within a couple hours of CA. Since we’ve been suffering a drought here since 1994, I’m not allowed to complain about this, even though all of my outdoor circuits have permanently popped their GFCIs, and I had to spend $10K repairing our interior roads and replacing the folded-back corrugated steel roof on our hangar. Oh yeah, the rain got pretty windy last fall.
If I don’t at least get a desert full of owl clover out of it this spring, I’m gonna be pissed.
Thanks for that informative post.
Maybe if they wouldn’t let the water run off into the oceans the droughts wouldn’t be so hard to take.
And put the snail darter on crackers with some cheese, not on the endangered list.
Corrupt idiots have been running California for a few decades, and the same corrupt idiots now run the federal government.
While American slept….
We weren’t sleeping. We were working to produce actual GNP, while the sluggards with no jobs and regular government checks were sticking their fingers into government to “improve” it.
It’s why “public choice” trumps “eternal vigilance” every time, and always will.
Is “Atmospheric River” the new Polar Vortex, Bomb Cyclone, El Nina etc?
So, the DWR snow survey “expert” is beside himself that it’s the “wettest year on record dating back 40yrs”. 40 friggen years???? If your only reaching back less than my age you have proof of nothing and a meaningless statistic.