Rain

Fascinating story over at the LA Times, turns out the answer is it rained a lot.

(Damn, between here and Twitter I am just being a snarky lil bitch lately.  I blame Trump of course.  But I gotta watch myself, work on uplifting rather than degrading discourse)

All this rain in SoCal is a good reminder of what a huge problem flooding is here.  Somewhere in an old book I remember a scholar huffily declaring that LA is not in fact a desert, it’s an “arid floodplain.”  The devastating flood of 1938 killed something like 115 people.

Los Angeles River – flood of 1938 aerial view above Victory Blvd. Los Angeles River. View upstream from above Victory Blvd. showing breaches in paved levees in and below a sharp curve in channel alignment. River mile 32.0. This image is from the Report on Engineering Aspects, Flood of March 1938 by the U.S. Engineer Office in Los Angeles and compiled in August 1938.

Flood prevention is why the LA River is all concretey:

My eyes were opened to a lot of this by Wrenshall’s cousin DJ Waldie:

 who was Deputy City Manager of Lakewood in addition to being a thoughtful and insightful writer:

I should drive out to Silver Lake and see if there’s water:

source. Photo by wiki user Wilson44691 whose contributions are astounding