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Comment by cdrnsf | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in California my whole life (and the same town for most of that). This was the most rain I can remember in decades and the most "destruction" I've seen caused by it. Between the ground being saturated and wind before/after/during the storms there were plenty of downed trees.

We were also down to running sprinklers once a week (lawns are silly), but have had them off entirely for a bit now.

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Spent 7+ years north of Truckee. There have been wetter/more snow years.

California is big, and the LA basin can be extremely dry. For me this is the most I’ve seen since the one bad el nino season in the 90’s, but that one didn’t last nearly as long. It seems normal the last few years to get winter storm conditions that last months.

2025 was the coolest summer I’ve ever experienced living where I do near the coast with an onshore breeze that is now frigid and very wet at times. I usually get fog now in times of the year it rarely happened - almost like san francisco’s notorious summers.

Tracking local weather patterns used to be part of my last career so this stuff I notice pretty well.

not even close to 2023 or 2017 seasons here in norcal, not by a mile...

I am so sad I missed 2023. But now I have the skills to really enjoy the next dump.

If it makes you feel better 2017 was way better =) incredible conditions all the way into mid May. I was skiing palisades at squaw on 4th of July

I wish I'd missed it. We had 12 feet of snow in 3 weeks where I live in the Sierra, and we're only at 4,500 feet above sea level. We average several feet a year, so we know snow, but not 12 feet in 3 weeks. We couldn't see out of our windows. I spent 3-8 hours a day for 3 weeks clearing snow from our driveway and cul-de-sac, only to have to wait longer for the county to clear the road beyond. We were running out of places to put the snow we cleared. Towards the end, people could no longer clear their roofs because the snow on the ground was so high. Decks collapsed everywhere, as did several roofs. There was no getting out for supplies, emergencies, etc. The ski resort nearest us closed because it was too difficult to get there.

Immediately after, we had a foot of rain in two weeks. That took care of much of the snow. But it also washed away significant roads (along with several feet of earth beneath them), some of which took a year or more to get back open.

The ground was so saturated that many septic systems failed in my neighborhood, some with water running into the houses through toilets/drains because the underground water table on the high side of their property was above those drains (artesian springs aren't so charming when they are coming through your septic system and out of your toilet). Most of those folks have installed one-way valves now, but that still means you can't flush in such scenarios because the water has nowhere to go. Ours didn't flow in reverse, but our drains/toilets stopped draining for ~2 months.

I like winter weather, but I'd be happy to never relive Feb/Mar of 2023 in the Sierra. I'll still take it over the floods that happen in valleys and flat lands as a result of such events.

The statewide rain totals for the 2025-2026 water year so far rank 6th out of the years of the 21st century, so aren't that remarkable in context. Do you live in a place that got slapped with a peculiarly high rainfall?

Perhaps GP is thinking of last winter?

Heavy rain is usually very localized. I live in Norcal and I've seen many situations where we were getting hammered with multiple inches an hour while a few dozen miles away it wasn't raining at all, and vice versa. So even in a wet year whether your neighborhood gets slammed is a crap shoot.

Did you end up taking a color blindness test?

California is big! That's also why there have technically been small parts of California which have been in drought for the last few years while most of the state is in good shape.

This year, Southern California is having a wet year while most of Northern California is having a relatively dry one.

We're north of Los Angeles and the area has never really handled rain well. This is also entirely anecdotal having lived here for ~35 years.

Some of the towns in our county have developments built on floodplanes. In our neighborhood, only some streets have storm drains so many of them flood. On one of the main roads numerous trees fell over damaging walls and homes.

That last set of storms that really stands out were the El Niño events in the early oughts.

I wonder if overall rainfall doesn't tell the whole story. From my experience in SF (and admittedly CA is big and people will have very different experiences) there has been an enormous amount of rainfall early in the season and then another enormous amount over the holidays, but the rest has been dry. The total may not be that much but the acute heavy storms have been pretty intense.

Weren't there massive floods, in the Bay Area, last year?

The Bay Area is the size of Massachusetts. Depends on where in the Bay.

I guess I'm wrong. It was south of the Bay area. I live in NY, but I remember hearing from friends in CA that it got very bad.

I think this story is only the latest one:

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/more-rain-expec...

Same with SoCal - it's the size of NY State. CA's big and somewhat evenly populated (at least compared to similar states out east) so there's inevitably some form of environmental issue somewhere. Not to minimize these incidents ofc.

That article is about flooding that is about as far from the Bay Area as Suffolk, VA is from New York City.

It's in California but California is...large. Especially along the North-South axis.

Well, it’s also not what I was thinking about. There were some huge floods. It may have been more than a year ago. When you get to my age, time does weird things.

Nevermind. It’s not something that’s worth any agita. It’s obvious that it’s not something that left many scars.

It's rain on already saturated ground plus wind, which turns into downed trees and infrastructure issues instead of just replenishing water

curious where in CA. in the past 15y ive def. seen more rain lol.

I think this has to be seen as "over some span of time", because a drought is an "over some span of time" thing.

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