Wednesday February 26, 2025
The Guardian —
Dramatic rainstorms earlier this month brought more than 6in of rain to the California mountains – a full month’s worth of rain in little more than a day – but the deluge wasn’t enough to reverse a worsening drought trend that is set to intensify further in the coming weeks and months.
Along the iconic Pacific Coast highway in Malibu, where just weeks earlier flames leveled hundreds of oceanside homes, a Los Angeles firefighter was washed out to sea, and later rescued.
Massive debris flows transported a thick layer of mud into neighborhoods near Altadena, the same place where search and rescue crews had gone house to house searching for survivors among the wreckage of the worst wildfire disaster in the history of southern California. The hardest hit from the mudslides was the foothills town of Sierra Madre, which was under evacuation orders last month from the Eaton fire – and now must dig out from a newly deposited feet-thick layer of muck.
Such “weather whiplash” – a telltale sign of the climate crisis – looks to shift the semi-arid south-western corner of the US back toward drought as the month of March approaches.