The Calm
I just sent my kids a picture from the weather.com hurricane tracker that’s projecting the path of Hurricane Hilary as it works its way up the Baja, slightly faster than expected, it turns out. The picture I sent was the Midnight projection and the way the weather.com app works, it pegs your cell phone location on its maps. The hurricane path, in fuscia, is about 100 miles wide, just shy of the width of the Baja itself and going north up to Furnace Creek, in the middle of Death Valley. The little blue arrow that indicates where we are located falls just a snick west of the centerline of that fuscia hurricane path. In other words, if this hurricane stayed as a Cat 3 or 4 storm, as it currently stands down on the Baja, and it followed the predicted path, we would be in for one helluva blow up here on the hilltop. But that predicted path is accompanied by a dramatic draining of the energy of the storm, first from the cooler waters as it reaches the United States border, then, as always happens with hurricanes, when it leaves the ocean and comes ashore, and then finally as it bumps its way up along the spine of mountains between us and the Imperial Valley to the east. By the time it gets up to us on this hilltop, which will occur sometime in the wee hours of the early morning, it will have been degraded to as tropical storm with winds no higher than 35-40 mph. But even though all the rain is currently off in the eastern half of the county, I am presuming that the counter-clockwise storm system will drive a fair share of that rain into the center of that fuscia band nod onto our heads on this hilltop. They say its expected to dump 9-10 inches of rain on us. Our normal annual average rainfall here is 15 inches or so. The weather.com app says it will be raining here from 1am until until the end of the day. The rain guide says that one inch of rain for five hours (half of what we should be getting) creates standing water and runoff. So, its fair to assume we will be pretty wet tomorrow, but I think that will be it.
This evening, the sunset was spectacular and we get lots of pretty sunsets up here, so to say that it had to be amazing. And the air is so still that it brings a whole new meaning to the expression the calm before the storm. This storm is such a unique phenomenon here in Southern California that we’ve been on alert for two days now. Today was a more or less grey day that inched its way up the 70’s and never quite cracked the 80 mark. This morning I went for a haircut, only my second in four years since I’m in the habit of cutting my own hair these days. I got the haircut as a nod to the special occasion of the upcoming wedding of my youngest son, Tom. After returning home, Kim asked me to go to the grocery store with her. I’ve done that about as often as I’ve gone for a haircut since moving out here, but I went since it felt like it was a funny and very calm day. The store was busier than normal, but not crazy. The water aisle was pretty wiped out, but otherwise, this was not yet a total panic like it might be if this was Florida with a Cat 4 hurricane bearing down on us. I can’t tell if that’s our lack of familiarity with the risks (I assure you we know how to overreact to wildfire and seismic alerts much more), or that this really is logically not the sort of area that will likely get slammed so badly by a deflated tropical storm. I guess we’ll find out.
When I started to write this story, you can tell from the title that I chose that I felt like everything was very subdued about this overnight impending storm. Believe it or not, that just changed in real time a moment ago. Both Kim’s and my phone just buzzed with an emergency alert from the San Diego Emergency Alert System. It told us to be very careful due to the coming storm and the rain and flooding that was likely to accompany it. Suddenly everybody is taking this thing very seriously. We were supposed to have dinner tomorrow night down on the water in San Diego with my private banker, who happens to be in town this weekend to deliver his daughter to college. Yesterday we spoke and he was at a Padres baseball game and we decided that he would come up here (where it was presumably going to be less severe weather) for dinner instead. After this alert a few minutes ago, which I guess he got as well (I really am not sure how those work, but apparently they are based on geo-positioning rather than home base), he texted me and said we should just play this all by ear tomorrow night. I agreed that was a good idea. I am still not terribly worried about what the weather in the morning will hold, but I suspect there will be some impact with which to deal.
I suspect that the likeliest impact will be the SDG&E will end up turning off the grid in this area if they are concerned that the wind may take down power lines like it did in Maui or a few years ago in Paradise, California, scene of another horrific wildfire incident instigated by PG&E not shutting down the grid and downed lines erupting in fire. If that does happen, I have twin Tesla wall batteries that carry a total of 27 kWh’s of juice to carry us through until there’s enough sunshine to recharge the batteries during daylight. Those batteries get used daily for peak/off-peak load shifting, but I haven’t used them for a grid shut-down in two years. I’m presuming it will all work tickety-boo, but I’ve learned in the past not to expect too much from this sort of technology. It’s not that its ineffective, its just that even the best of installation teams seem to be pretty short of actual operating experience with these solar/battery systems. At least that was the case two years ago and I can’t be certain that things have changed since then. Strangely enough, the only thing I can’t charge with those batteries is my Tesla car, but I put it on recharge for the night and expect it to be fully charges with 200 miles of range tomorrow morning. Our grocery run leaves us pretty well set for food, but of course that will somewhat depend on the grid and the batteries and the refrigerator. Our stove works off propane and I think our tank is at lest at 73%, according to my account information.
So that is about all I can do other than help out my pal, Mike, who is away in Arizona this weekend. When I texted him to ask if I could do anything for him in his absence he said he thought he would be fine so long as there wasn’t more than 3 inches of rain. I told him we were likely to exceed that so we just agreed to check in with one another in the morning. It seems that both Mike and I are pretty calm about this all. Let’s see how it all pans out tomorrow.