It wasn’t unexpected, but it’s finally here and there’s been no shortage of fiascos in the first week of the global weather phenomenon that is El Niño.
Predicted by weather scientists for the past year, El Niño is a band of warm ocean water that develops over the eastern/central portion of the Pacific Equator. According to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, the event means lots of rain and cool weather for Southern California, much to the relief of citizens who’ve endured a four-year-long drought.
Santa Barbara County has received several inches of rain in the past week alone. According to an online real-time rainfall map provided by the county Public Works Department, many parts of the county—mostly in South County—received anywhere from 3 inches to 4.5 inches of rain.
Most of it came between the days of Jan. 5 and 6, causing major street flooding in downtown Santa Barbara and Goleta.
Perhaps nothing can be more symbolic of El Niño’s arrival in Santa Maria than a picture of what appears to be a snowman.
It was actually hail, although it was at first perceived as snow. Taija Hansen was working in her office at Achilles Prosthetics and Orthotics in Santa Maria on the morning of Jan. 6 when she noticed the pea-sized hail accumulating on the ground and began video recording.
“It totally looks like snow,” she said. “It kind of built up around certain parts of the office. It was piling up and it was crazy.”
Hansen told the Sun that she’s never seen that much hail before. But what does one do when it hails as much as it did that day? Make a “hail man,” of course. She even scooped a handful of it and stuck it in her freezer, where it sits preserved in its original form.
The storm brought a little chaos to the local airports. Lightning knocked out power at the San Luis Obispo County Regional Airport on Jan. 7 and temporarily halted flights, according to an update posted on the airport’s Facebook page.
Just before the SLO airport lost power, Arroyo Grande resident Jeff Diehl’s plane arrived at the airport after a long and weather-delayed trip.
Diehl was originally scheduled to fly into the Santa Maria Public Airport on Monday, Jan. 4. However, Diehl said pilots couldn’t get permission to fly from Seattle, where he was departing, into San Francisco, where he was scheduled to meet his connecting flight home, until three hours after Diehl’s originally scheduled departure time.
By the time he got into San Francisco, Diehl’s United Airlines flight to Santa Maria had already left. So airport officials gave him blankets and put him on a next-day flight to San Luis Obispo. He didn’t feel that inconvenienced, though.
“It was a bit of an adventure,” Diehl told the Sun, although he added it wasn’t too pleasant sleeping in an airport. “It was my first time spending the night in the airport. It was really uncomfortable. The automated loudspeaker kept us up and made it really hard to sleep.”
Once he got back, Diehl still had to retrieve his car and luggage from the Santa Maria airport.
In Solvang, City Manager Brad Vidro canceled the annual Christmas tree burn on Jan. 8 because the conditions were just too wet.
“It’s a real wet puddle out there,” Vidro told the Sun. “The rain really did us in. The pile is sopping wet.”
The burn won’t be rescheduled. Instead, the trees will be sent to the Santa Maria landfill, Vidro said.
Is all of this a foreshadowing of what’s to come? It’s more than likely, said Bill Patzert, a self-described “people’s” climatologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He said that what we see now is modest compared to what’s coming. Compared to the El Niño in 1998, this one is still growing.
And like the one in ’98, we could see a very, very rainy February to say the least—as much as a year’s worth of rainfall in one month, Patzert says.
“This week is the trailer of the real movie,” Patzert told the Sun.
The “Godzilla” El Niño, as Patzert calls it, could last well into April or even May.
Patzert said the impact it’s had on California so far is relatively minor compared to other parts of the world. According to UK newspaper The Guardian, El Niño flooding has displaced more than 100,000 people across Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil.
Despite the bucket of water that’s about to be dropped on California and the “chaos” that will ensue, Patzert said the state could really use the water.
Don’t expect this El Niño to cure the drought, Patzert said, adding that residents should be more concerned about personal water consumption habits.
“The bottom line is that all of the conservation habits we have adopted over the past couple of years, that’s permanent,” Patzert said. “The worst thing that happened last week is people leaving their sprinklers on when it rains.”
Staff Writer David Minsky can be reached at dminsky@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 14-21, 2016.