News of the Arroyo
Title: | No time for manly posturing |
Subtitle: | |
Date: | 2005-01-14 |
Summary: | January 14, 2005 - PSN Editor Larry Wilson expounds on the flood threat in the Arroyo and Southern California. |
Author: | Larry Wilson |
Publication: | Pasadena Star News |
Content: | WHAT ON Earth is Gov. Schwarzenegger doing with his pep talk at La Conchita encouraging residents to hang tough and rebuild? This isn\'t a movie set. We don\'t have to be plot-driven. In real life, pseudo-inspirational stories can kill. And yet the guv put on his leather jacket, dropped out of the sky, puffed out his chest and told Conchitans they are \"very strong. It\'s something I noticed right away. One of the first things they said is, you know, \'We\'ll be back.\' \' God, when are we ever going to hear the end of that line? \"I would say that I\'m going to help them so they can come back here,\' he said. You can imagine how pleased the Ventura County officials who have for a decade been trying to save people from themselves, given the inevitability of another deadly landslide, were to hear Schwarzenegger say that. I don\'t mean to rain on the parade of the seemingly wonderful people who live there. They found in quirky, scary, relatively cheap La Conchita a place they could actually afford to live on a California beach. Who in the world doesn\'t share that dream? I\'m just saying that it\'s more than irresponsible of our governor to indulge in such macho political posturing. Geologists say La Conchita will always be an unsafe place to live. You could spend hundreds of millions and make it somewhat safer, sure. And where in the governor\'s belt-tightening, teacher-bashing, nurse-bashing budget is that money supposed to come from? XXX I happened to eat lunch Tuesday with Caltech Provost Paul Jennings, a seismic engineer. He warns that mudslides in places less obviously at risk than La Conchita can occur months after a super-saturation such as we\'ve had. A west Pasadena resident who lives near the Arroyo Seco, he talked about his amazement at the volume of water thousands of cubic feet per second flowing muddy and wide and deep through the arroyo\'s central flood-control channel when he went down to take a look earlier this week. As we left the Athenaeum, we walked past cosmologist Stephen Hawking\'s table. Quite ill with pneumonia last year at his Cambridge home, he looks to be in good health now. I just hope he didn\'t leave England for Pasadena for the weather. XXX Here in the San Gabriel Valley, the intensity of the recent storms is a reminder that the supposedly benign weather of Southern California is often anything but that. Most of the time, sure, we\'re parched. But as John McPhee famously describes in his 1989 book \"The Control of Nature,\' some of the heaviest rain ever recorded anywhere on Earth in a given period falls in the San Gabriel Mountains. I believe that it was in upper Eaton Canyon in April 1926 that a rain gauge collected more than an inch a minute during one short burst. And I recall well when in 1969 over 44 inches fell in the mountains in nine days. Eaton Canyon flowed like the Colorado, blasting away the stables and a restaurant at New York Drive. And such will happen again. Just not tomorrow, please. -- Larry Wilson is editor of the Pasadena Star-News. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Write him at larry.wilson@sgvn.com . |
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