One of the news sites I visit regularly carries this story on the California rainstorms and quotes some CA official calling them “among the most deadly disasters in our history.” In the aggregate, this is probably technically correct, if also highly misleading.
I have spent the past month in CA, a week north and the rest south, have lived through all of the rain in an RV, which makes me a “reporter” of sorts onsite. Most folks here were at most inconvenienced a bit by road closures and the unaccustomed lack of sunshine.
Some mountain pass roads that suffer from rock slides are closed, but that happens with some frequency in wet years. Some areas that have experienced a burn off in the past couple of years may have some erosion and some damage to homes built too close to normally dry barrancas.
The story claims the storms have “killed at least 19 people.” That sounds like a lot, until you realize that CA contains about 1 in 8 Americans which is nearly 40 million. That makes your typical Californian’s odds of storm death at roughly 1 out of 2 million. I’d guess most years that many die from falling down.
As I’ve noted here before, I grew up on the edge of Los Padres National Forest. We experienced a “forest” fire (brushfire, mostly) every 3-4 years.
The press was forever printing that our town burned down, panicking our relatives who lived elsewhere who would call to see if we were still alive. The worst of the fires never got within several miles of our house or indeed most houses in the valley.
Journalists then and now live by the motto “if it bleeds, it leads.” They try to make everything look worse than it is because it hypes viewership.
They mostly don’t make stuff up, they just select the worst images they can find and infer those are typical, without actually saying so. They’ll show you a real storm-damaged house or drowned car and omit showing the the dozens farther down the block which are intact. Face it, undamaged property and uninjured people are not a “story,” they’re just daily life.
Later … Steven Hayward at Power Line has a chart showing CA rainfall totals for the last 100+ years. Annual rainfall is highly variable but there is no obvious trend line.
