Here Comes Hilary
You just can’t make this stuff up. What are the odds that while the news cycle is filled with nothing but news of Trump’s turbulent criminal indictment predicament, something that is repeatedly said to be unprecedented, another unprecedented natural event should occur like a hurricane in the Pacific that decides to sweep up along the Baja to deposit itself on the doorstep of Southern California. There it is expected to batter the coastline a bit, but particularly dump unprecedented amounts of summer rain (up to two year’s worth) on the otherwise scorched earth of everywhere from San Diego to Palm Springs, all the way up the Mojave and Death Valley to Las Vegas and the Great Basin. As we all know, hurricane and tropical storm names are not random. 75 years or so ago, a group called the World Meteorological Organization, consisting of 187 member countries, got together and came up with six years worth of alphabetically organized names, one list for the Atlantic and one list for the Pacific. Who knew that a hurricane would slip across the isthmus from the Caribbean into the Pacific into the land of tropical storms and typhoons, but the naming convention holds anyway and the next name up on rotation is nothing less than Hilary. It would have been even funnier if it had been Hillary, but then no one ever really remembers how to spell Ms. Clinton’s name anyway.
So here we are, hunkering down watching the weather channels as they track the August Pacific Hurricane Hilary as she heads for landfall somewhere between Tijuana and San Diego. It is currently a Cat 4 with winds of 135-145 mph, but this is expected to dissipate down to a Cat 1 or less due to the cooler waters up this way by the time it gets here. That means we are likely to only get winds of 35-45 mph, which are not so very different from typical Santa Ana winds that come through from the inland mountains every once in a while. But the rain is the real concern. You would think that given the 13 atmospheric rivers that the Pacific dished up to us earlier this year, a little rain wouldn’t hurt us. Like everything in life, there is quantity and there is speed of delivery. In this case, its predicted that the huge amount of rain that may get dumped from the sky will come so fast that the rock-hard desert earth will not be able to absorb much of it and there will be flash floods all over the region. This is one of those times when I’m glad to be situated on the top of the hill and not below some hillside that might decide to slide down towards me. I am also glad that our house is perched on a very substantial piece of granite bedrock, which may seem a bother during construction and not accommodate many basements in the area, but sure does help keep the house from sliding down the hill in a mudslide at times like this. Natural hazards seem to be lurking around every corner these days and the property & casualty insurance industry has picked up on that trend and is running for the hills away from every type of disaster you can conjure, including Hurricane Hilary. Last week I heard of a house up in Santa Barbara on three acres that commanded an annual insurance premium of $84,000. That’s twelve times what I pay for my 2.5 acres, so I guess I should be happy…until next year’s premium increase.
This is a wondrous and curious place where everything grows easily even without water, but give it too much water and all hell can break loose. Earlier this year we had a water leak of significant proportions (600 gallons/hour when the spa pump was on for four hours a day = 2,400 gallons per day). That water found its way not into the ground, but down the hardened front hillside. It cost me a twenty foot high candelabra cactus of magnificent proportions and a fourteen-foot high Saguaro cactus that was approximately 75 years old. I managed to salvage a five foot arm of the Saguaro, which is starting its slow skyward stretch where its father stood. Since that little guy will only grow at about 1.5 inches per year, I guess you might say I planted it for the next owner or the one after that…and beyond.
Kim has suggested that we batten down the hatches against the wind, but I’m not sure there is much to batten down. Ain’t it always the way that you don’t know what you got til its gone? With a dozen wind spinner sculptures in the back and side yards, I think that so long as they don’t spin so hard that they take off like a helicopter we should be good. As for the two palapas and the sail shade, they are designed to take the wind and dissipate it, so I’m expecting those to hold up as well. But others are getting into the act and SDG&E has, for the first time since I bought this hilltop a dozen years ago, issued us instructions for the worst. They include a long list of To-Do’s. They want us to have an emergency plan and an emergency kit (we have several and gave them to all local family members a few years ago). They caution us to stay tuned to the emergency broadcast system for San Diego and to tie shit down. The one good suggestion is that I lower my three umbrellas. They want us to keep our cell phones charged (we pretty much do that every day), and consider what our plan is for backup power. I have two Tesla batteries, so I should be good on that front for a day or two assuming the sun shines during the day to allow them to recharge. And then the last bit of advice is to be on the lookout for the smell of gas leaks. I guess the whole Maui tragedy has caused the emergency management people to get on their game. You may have seen that the Maui emergency director who failed to allow the warning sirens to be blasted before the wildfires roared through Lahaina had to resign in disgrace. We wouldn’t want that to happen here, so we are taking this Hurricane Hilary thing very seriously all of a sudden.