This is the strangest period of time in my nearly 21 years living in San Diego. Storm warning alarms were supposed to be what OTHER STATES had to endure — not California.
The special BEEP BEEP BEEP storm warning noise comes at you from television seemingly every hour, warning of a new flood watch. At the bottom of the screen National Weather Service bulletins slowly crawl by….warning of flood warnings near Riverside…telling about the possibility that a tornado may soon appear near San Onofre (the area near the nuclear power plant).
It is strange. It reminds me of 1980-1981 when I worked as a staff writer on the Wichita Eagle and had to cover tornados, and the weather was always THE story in Kansas. Today, here in California, it’s death and destruction via flooding and mudslides for the less fortunate. For the fortunate — like TMV — some neighbors report some excess water and you have to move your stuff away from the garage door or the water outside may shove foward and drench it.
This morning a natural wake-up alarm: a brutal downpour, most likely mixed with hail, with the sound of rain/hail banging on the the glass window so hard you could see it shake. Meanwhile, in Iran today, an earthquake killed at least 400 people. Mother Nature is angry.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.