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SubiculumCode 2 hours ago

Does this mean California is more likely to get mega flooding?

dredmorbius a minute ago | parent | next [-]

[delayed]

chewbacha 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, atmospheric rivers all winter.

Next year a super bloom then the following year massive wild fires.

rain -> fuel -> fire

asdff an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most of the most flood prone areas in CA have been significantly neutered over the decades thanks to massive water projects. There was a time when the LA river would destroy LA routinely. Now everything is channelized. At risk communities are probably the handful of remote ones that do not have great infrastructure, but I'm not even sure where those might be given how the state seems to be able to build thousands of debris flow cement storm drain setups in relevant areas.

Other states seem a lot worse off. Water table is closer to where people live, there's a lack of topology to actually run water out in a lot of cases, there's been little investment in managing water for stormwater for property damage abatement or power or irrigation like in CA where the topology really incentivized massive investment in all of that over the last century.

alephnerd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We haven't had any significant flooding in past El Niños. Of course, it will probably be different this round, but at least El Niños tend to align with Mediterranean weather instead of droughts and wildfires.

We also have one of the more advanced waterwork system in the US to support Central Valley agriculture, so a lot of the worst aspects can be somewhat managed.

It's bad that such dramatic climate change is happening, but we're definetly lucky to live in the West Coast because we won't face the brunt of some of the worst aspects of the El Niño comparatively and have the infrastructure to deal with it.

Sadly, the brunt of climate change will be felt by the poorer half of the world.

jeffbee 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The costliest floods in state history were in the winter 1994-1995 which was a weak El Niño year.

alephnerd 2 hours ago | parent [-]

True, but a lot of that was due to a lack of integrated water management (IWM) in California at the time, and led to significant reforms as well as infra expansion to prevent that from happening again.

The Lima Prieta Quake and the 1990s floods led to a lot of future proofing in Californian infra. The last major thing left is transmission weathering, which PGE and Sac are fighting over.

Also, most of our infra is state funded which gives us a lot of leeway.

Like I said before, it's bad that we're in this position and it's only going to get worse, but we're in one of the better places that can survive these kinds of shifts.