FIERCE HILARY BRINGS HEAVY RAINS
Tropical storm, which began as a hurricane, hits Baja hard before surge into Southland.
After days of urgent warnings and anxious preparations, Tropical Storm Hilary released its fury over Southern California late Sunday as it pummeled beaches, mountains and deserts with a once-ina-lifetime summer deluge that canceled flights, closed schools, submerged roads, triggered rock slides and flooded a desert hospital.
After making landfall in Baja California around 11 a.m. and reducing streets there to rivers of mud, the storm swept northward toward California’s most populous region. Beaches in San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties were ordered closed, while the worst of the storm was forecast to hit the mountains and deserts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, depositing 5 to 10 inches of rain.
As residents braced themselves Sunday afternoon, however, they were thrown another curve by Mother Nature — a 5.1 magnitude earthquake centered near Ojai rocked the region at 2:41 p.m., adding to the general sense of anxiety. Social media quickly dubbed the event California’s first ever “hurriquake.”
In the meantime, heavy rain and strong winds lashed Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, where floodwaters entered Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage. Airlines canceled hundreds of West Coast flights, many of them connecting with airports in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and San Diego, according to FlightAware, an airline tracking service.
President Biden weighed in Sunday evening, noting that he had deployed the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Coast Guard so that “federal personnel and supplies that can be surged to impacted communities” and in place should there be a need “for rapid response and searchand-rescue efforts.”
“My Administration stands ready to provide additional assistance as requested. I urge people to take this storm seriously, and listen to state and local officials,” he said in a statement.
In Los Angeles County, a daylong flash flood warning was extended into the early morning, while the Los Angeles Unified School District announced that schools would be closed Monday to ensure that campuses could be inspected after Hilary passed through and to avoid potential morning commute hazards.
The uncertainty brought by the storm led to wide
ranging — but not universal — public school closures across much of Southern California, including Pasadena, Palm Springs and San Diego.
“This is an unprecedented weather event,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass warned during a Sunday morning news conference. “Right now again, it is critical that Angelenos stay safe and stay home unless otherwise directed by safety officials. Avoid unnecessary travel. If you do not need to be on the road, please don’t get in your car.”
Across Southern California, residents in flood-prone areas had gathered to fill sandbags, as shoppers emptied shelves of batteries, water and other goods. Some of the worst areas for flooding would be in the deserts, forecasters said.
“That’s the area of the most concern and of the greatest risk of significant flooding,” said Ryan Kittell, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Oxnard. Places such as Lancaster — which averages 7 inches of rain a year — could see that amount in just one day.
“Flooding can happen very quickly with this kind of system,” he said.
Just days earlier, Hilary had reached the status of a Category 4 hurricane, thanks largely to warmerthan-average ocean temperatures off the coast of Mexico and a rare high-pressure heat dome in the Central United States.
Those factors allowed Hurricane Hilary to get unusually close to California before it entered cooler waters and was downgraded to a tropical storm.
Still, tropical storm rains are unrelenting, and very unlike the intermittent winter storms the region is accustomed to, forecasters said. “It’s the high-intensity rainfall in a short period of time that causes the flooding and flash flooding,” said weather service meteorologist Joe Sirard. “That’s the danger.”
Even before the storm approached Sunday, evacuation warnings had been issued for Santa Catalina Island and some communities in San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
In some cases, however, residents from Southern California to Tijuana — many who have never experienced a tropical storm — shrugged off the dangers of the storm.
“My plan is I’m just gonna stay right here and I’m just gonna work,” said Johnathan Muñoz, in the Tijuana neighborhood of Aviacion. Muñoz planned to sell candy for 10 pesos — less than $1. “It’s the only way I make money.”
In advance of the storm, the Mexican government put 18,000 soldiers on alert. Officials in the flood-prone Tijuana area opened five temporary shelters and reported that families had already begun arriving late Saturday night. Beaches were also closed.
“I’m just praying that nobody gets hurt,” Muñoz said.
But several said they hadn’t taken precautions even as they knew that the poor infrastructure was unlikely to prevent flooding.
“I’m going to be here,” said Julian Castillo, whose family has lived in Tijuana’s middle-class Colonia Castillo neighborhood since the 1990s. Just a block away, deep murky water pooled at the bottom of a hill.
“It always gets flooded. When it rains down there it clogs very easily,” Castillo said. “People here don’t clean up the storm drains before the rain. They do it after something happens.”
Over the border in California, San Bernardino County Fire Battalion Chief Mike McClintock said more than 100,000 sandbags had been distributed to residents at fire stations over the last couple of days.
Other county departments were busy clearing out floodways and evacuating homeless people along drainage areas in the region. The county added more than 50 people to swift-water evacuation and strike teams so they could more quickly respond to emergencies during the storm, McClintock said.
“We have an all-handson-deck approach to getting things going,” he said before the storm’s arrival Sunday. “This tropical storm making landfall is kind of historic in our generation. We are not taking that lightly.”
The county ordered evacuations in mountain areas with serious burn scars from the El Dorado and Apple fires in recent years.
“We’ve seen over this last rainy system immense amount of mudflow and debris flow going downhill in those areas,” McClintock said. “We have been preparing, but better safe than sorry, and we’re asking residents in those areas to heed those warnings.”
Surprisingly, the San Diego area had averted heavy rains for much of the day.
That was largely because of the storm’s positioning and the way the mountains were blocking some of the wind and rain coming from the east, said Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist.
“There have been some wind gusts up above 80 mph so far in the San Diego County mountains, but there hasn’t been very much wind down at ocean level in San Diego County. That’s because the mountains are both blocking the wind and intercepting a lot of the precipitation,” Swain said. “So San Diego is ironically in the rain shadow.”