Hacker News Reader

Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

I cannot speak for California, but in PNW there is even less “surprising, sudden weather thingies.”

Rain is not pouring, unlike on east coast (speaking from my expeirences in both NYC and Atlanta), it is just drizzling at a very low rate. It doesnt thunderstorm. I’ve heard thunder iirc only 2-3 times in my 7 years living there. No tornados or tsunamis. No massive blizzards out of nowhere. I felt this earthquake in NYC today myself, and I remember having a similarly strong eathquake in Seattle only a couple of times.

I have no idea where this “west coast and its sudden weather thingies” take comes from (again, I cannot speak for California), but it runs counter to everything I’ve personally experienced.

View on HN

I thought California had a lot of Earthquakes.

Oregon is full of volcanoes and about to slip off the continental shelf, right? But I guess those surprises just exists in potential form.

I have lived in California for something like 33 of my 36 years. I have actually felt a grand total of 3 earthquakes in my entire life. Even out here, quakes big enough to shift the wall decorations across a large portion of the state are vanishingly rare.

Uh... This is incorrect, and probably largely dependent on where exactly you live. Just go look at an earthquake swarm map of CA. Near the fault in Los Angeles have been dozens if not more of small/midsized/large quakes that could produce the effects you're talking about. I had one in my office just the other week that freaked everyone out.

I'm not saying there aren't earthquakes. I'm saying actually feeling/noticing them is extremely rare in my experience. Maybe I have just lived in exactly the right places over the years. Probably many happened when I was doing something that masked them, but nonetheless in over 30 years I have noticed just a few quakes, and only one was significant enough to leave any evidence in the form of moved objects.

There actually are tornados in the PNW. Both Washington and Oregon get about 1.7 per year. Here are maps of the tornados here since 1950 for Washington [1] and Oregon [2].

For Washington, in the 134 tornados since 1950 there were 6 fatalities, 303 direct injuries, and $31 million in damages. However most of that was from a single bad year, 1972, which had 4 tornados and all 6 of those fatalities, along with 301 of the 303 injuries. $25 million of the damages were from that year, too.

For Oregon it was 130 tornados since 1950, with 0 fatalities and 5 injuries. $32 million in damages. Like Washington most of the damage came from one year, 1968, with $25 million in damages.

Even though they are rare it turns out that we do have a functioning tornado warning system here. I found this out a few years when my iPhone started blaring a very loud alarm--louder than anything I'd ever heard from it before.

[1] https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/tornado-archive/

[2] https://data.statesmanjournal.com/tornado-archive/

Louder than those about a spotted wanted honda civic?

I've definitely seen a few "pouring rainstorms" this year where I'm at in the PNW. If you live in the Seattle area you're actually in the rain shadow of the Olympics, but when you get to about Mountlake Terrace to just south of Everett you're in a convergence zone and get all the weather that diverted around the northern half of the Olympics, so you can get a crazy amount of water there. I've also seen a LOT of rain just touring the Olympic coast(The Hoh rainforest is the wettest forest in the US), and also out on the San Juan islands and in the Bellingham area.

I've also been day hiking after work and gotten more than a few heavy rains. One of which almost gave me hypothermia because it snuck up on me while I was in the woods on top of something during one of those drizzles you're referring to.

> in PNW there is even less “surprising, sudden weather thingies.”

I'd put the constant wildfires in the weather thing bucket.

I count fires as a form of weather in CA, would probably apply to the PNW too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com