Weather officials had been warning Californians about the wrath of El Niño for months — even as some residents had begun to think the typically soaking climate pattern had gone AWOL.
But after an anemic start to the state’s rainy season, those admonitions have come to bear in brutal fashion as fast-moving storms have inundated portions of Ventura, Los Angeles and San Diego counties, flooding neighborhoods, spurring water rescues, triggering evacuations and stunning experts with their strength and magnitude.
On Dec. 21, a storm barreled through Oxnard and delivered a month’s worth of rain in less than an hour, officials said. And this week, a similarly historic event drenched San Diego with more rain in a few hours than the area typically sees in all of January.
Both were called “thousand-year events” — or events with 0.1% likelihood in a given year — and prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare states of emergency . Now, as Southern Californians continue to recover from the buffeting, some experts warn that El Niño, climate change and seasonal patterns have made such storms more likely to occur than ever.