With all these once in a 100 year events happening in the past decade it makes you rethink just how chaotic the 1910s-1930s were.
There probably were a number of extreme weather events that hit CA before the 19th century. In fact if you delve into it, there are a number of legends passed down from the indigenous peoples describing huge fires and unbelievable rain storms that flooded the whole of the central valley. 40M of people now live in a place where we have literally no idea what kind of weird one-off weather events hit every 100-200 years.
There’s not a separate science of “West Coast weather phenomena”.
> There probably were a number of extreme weather events that hit CA before the 19th century.
Doubtless. No one would be surprised by this.
> In fact if you delve into it, there are a number of legends passed down from the indigenous peoples describing huge fires and unbelievable rain storms that flooded the whole of the central valley.
Huge fires are clearly things that can happen in California. Rain storms flooding the whole Central Valley aren’t as extreme as, say, over-a-month rain storms producing flooding everywhere on earth, as legends go, but have similar plausibility problems in that (1) they would leave material evidence which would have been found, and (2) the very same absence of a large-scale community with detailed records and communications that lets you say “the West Coast US has basically no historical record” means that the source of any such legend would necessarily have to be really free extrapolation from a much narrower observation.
I mean, shit happens?
Track looks much farther inland: the 1939 storm hit Long Beach, the track for this is predicted to run over what looks like about the Imperial Valley, and up north toward (and potentially still with tropical storm winds into parts of) Nevada. Less populated areas directly in the track, but pretty much the whole width of Southern California is potentially going to get tropical storm strength winds, as well as whatever rains this brings, which are the real problem.
The flash flood risk maps are…quite extensive. [0]
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_ep4+shtml/204534.s...
LA nowadays has an incredibly robust flood control system. I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being a bad thunderstorm and mostly a nothing burger.
When a hurricane practically wiped Galveston off the map in 1900, US weather forecasting capabilities were extremely limited. [1] On a much smaller scale, there was the Blizzard of '78 which basically shut down Boston for a week and stuck many drivers on Route 128 from which they had to be laboriously evacuated. Quite a few people were stuck in their offices for a week--all in part because the storm pretty much caught everyone by surprise.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeastern_United_States_bli...
“Remnants of” Hurricane Ida killed 44 people in the NYC area in 2021, this is expected to still qualify as a tropical storm when it makes landfall.