Tuesday, March 8, 2005 My Turn • Speaking of the weather

Publisher’s note: This story originally appeared in the Tuesday, March 8, 2005 edition of the Lassen County Times.

Weather is something everyone pays attention to.

It’s often the lead subject in casual conversation. So, let’s talk about the weather for a moment.

It’s been crazy. But not so much around here. We’ve actually had a pretty normal winter, temperature and water wise. But the weather patterns on the West Coast have been unusual, to say the least. And some strange stuff has gone down.

Up until the middle of December, it looked like we would have another mild winter, like the last two or three. Nothing unusual. Then, just after the holidays, we got hit … hard. The snow was so deep I almost couldn’t get in and out to my house. Snow was piled high on Susanville streets, and the roads were treacherous.

In January, it was warmer some places in Alaska than around here. I had to fly to Las Vegas in January. I was worried I wouldn’t make it due to fog.

You remember the fog? It was ugly for more than a week. Driving down Highway 395 was spooky. Cars would suddenly appear out of the mist, like ghosts haunting the highway. Well, I got to Vegas all right, but my return trip the next day was cancelled due to fog in Reno.

The Vegas airport was a nightmare. People who had flown in from the East Coast for the weekend were stranded because a severe winter storm had closed many Midwestern and Northeastern airports. It took hours to check in and go through the security checkpoints. People were lined up everywhere.

When I did manage to find room on a flight back a day later, everything was blanketed in fog.

Looking out the airplane window, I could see the valleys were socked in, with only the highest peaks poking through the muck. I still don’t know how the pilot managed to put the plane down in Reno when he had to nose dive into pea soup.

Once in the fog layer, it was a total whiteout. Looking out my little window, I couldn’t see the ground until we were probably less than 100 feet off the ground. White knuckle time, to say the least.

And now, in March, this rare weather formation called a Rex Block sets up shop just off the coast and sits there spinning for more than a week, pumping copious amounts of moisture into California and Nevada.

Think about it. For almost the last two weeks, West Coast weather has been upside down. Los Angeles has seen record rain while Seattle has been basking in warm sunshine. That’s role reversal.

As a result of all the rain, they had floods and landslides down south. They had waterspouts and tornadoes. What’s up with all that? I even heard that this is the third wettest season on record for Southern California … ever! But stay tuned. It’s not over yet. We could go to number one with a bullet on the weather hit parade charts before it’s done.

We still have a couple of months to go in California’s wet season. And given the unusual and unpredictable behavior of weather patterns so far this season, things could get ugly.

Weather patterns tend to persist once they set up. This one could have more unpleasant surprises for us. The old joke about selling beachfront property in the high desert may not be so funny before this one’s done.