Fire and Ice....and Rain!

Lots of rain. Actually, I was spared most of this evening's downpour, but parts of Los Angeles were completely flooded out when over five inches of rain fell in less than two hours. Longtime residents agree today was the strangest weather day ever in Los Angeles.

I left UCLA around 4:45 this afternoon and saw the clouds gathering strength. It had showered earlier in the afternoon, but the rain had dissipated on the west side. As I drove east towards Hollywood, the sky became darker and darker. It was unbelievably dark! I've never seen a more ominous looking sky here in Southern California.

But the most spectacular and bizarre sight was the unbelievable (and unprecedented) lightning storm coming over the Hollywood Hills! I have lived in SoCal for seven years and I have witnessed lightning a total of three times. By that, I mean three strikes, not three storms! Well, this evening we had over 100 lightning strikes in the LA metropolitan area!

It was so fun and exciting, mostly because I wasn't in the worst of it. Traffic was already piling up the closer I got to home, but I was able to take some alternate routes and get home safely. There was just a light rainfall when I arrived home. I turned on the TV and all the news stations had wall-to-wall coverage of the storm. South LA was getting hit the worst -- they got pounded with rain and lightning (which caused several blackouts), and -- it gets weirder -- hail!!!

It has NEVER hailed like this in Los Angeles. The hail was so deep on the streets, it looked like snow! The pictures were just amazing. I couldn't believe what I was seeing on the TV. This extreme weather happens sometimes in Colorado, sure, but never in California. The TV news people were just as stunned as I was. I've never seen reporters so incredulous over what they were reporting.

The worst part of the whole story was that the storm hit its peak right at the evening rush hour. So traffic was backed up on the freeways and the side streets for miles. In fact some roads were closed due to flooding. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of cars were stranded in the flooded streets, and people stuck on the freeways were at a standstill for hours.

Adding to the headache were the power outages caused by lightning strikes on some transformers (we saw the flashes and explosions live on TV) which pitched some neighborhoods into darkness and knocked out traffic signals all over the place.

The good news is for the ski resorts: they already have more snow now than they normally do at Christmas time! The bad news is that some areas affected by the recent wildfires could experience mudslides due to the heavy downpours.

Tonight on the late news, the rain had stopped, the waters were receding, but the reporters on scene were standing in almost a foot of pea-sized hail stones! Kids in the neighborhood parks were running and playing outside like it was snow. They showed one guy making snow angels. :o)

What a nightmare today! I loved it!!