You can usually spot newly arrived journalists to Los Angeles because they always want to write about how folks here make such a big deal about the rain. Like vacant starlets and ruthless moguls, the nation’s second-largest city being brought to its knees by a little wet weather remains a reliable clich & #233; on the pages of some of the best newspapers in the world.
Consider the mileage that New York Times reporter Charlie LeDuff got out his 2002 piece about the first storm of that year. “The city is uneasy this afternoon,” he smugly began. “A plague has descended from the sky and shattered the warm, mundane bliss.”
Weather in Southern California can be a very big deal indeed not just in the extreme cases, such as last week’s storms that left at least 10 people dead from the devastating mudslide in La Conchita, but in even more standard-issue rains that dump an inch or less at the Civic Center and then move on.
In dry years, it’s all about the fire dangers. In wet years, it’s about the mudslides (and a year or two after that, when it gets dry again, it’s about concerns on how the new vegetation has created more fire dangers). Even in an average year, it’s about the gunk that gets washed into the ocean, leaving the beaches out of commission for days or weeks.
Water has been the ultimate pivot point for regional growth not to mention the source of “Chinatown”-type intrigue, squabbles and scandals. But while L.A.’s water supply is more or less secure these days (thanks to our neighbors to the north and southeast), the wet weather has a way of putting ongoing problems in a more urgent light.
Like traffic or more accurately, gridlock. When it comes to commuting, Angelenos can be a pretty resilient lot, although a two-and-a-half hour trek one day last week from Woodland Hills to Mid-Wilshire nearly brought out the straitjackets. But what do you expect when most all the canyon roads were closed and motorists had to rely on the maxed out Ventura (101) and San Diego (405) freeways?
As Valley folks struggled to reach the on-ramps and then proceeded to just sit there they could have reflected on the big-budget proposals to add toll lanes or double-decker lanes to the freeways and how they face their own form of gridlock. Mostly, it’s because the federal government isn’t willing to fund them (just too much more pressing priorities in Iraq) but it’s also because neighborhood groups aren’t wild about having new lanes built in their backyard.
Also worth considering are the estimated 2 million illegal immigrants in California who take to those treacherous freeways without insurance and driver’s licenses and may not understand the rules of the road when the pavement is slick.
Need we be reminded that it was Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Republican lawmakers who not only stubbornly opposed issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants (a big issue during the recall campaign) but based it on nonsensical concerns about terrorist threats. Illegal immigrants had been issued California driver’s licenses for 65 years until 1994 when the economy turned south and fingers were conveniently pointed in their direction.
So you see the rain is not just some West Coast joke that Leno and Letterman can get a few cheap laughs out of. The rain exposes our vulnerabilities in ways we sometimes forget once the sky clears and the roads reopen.
-Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal.
