Everything always looks a bit brighter after it rains

This past week my girlfriend and I headed south through California to enjoy a little retreat together before an extended time apart. It is a drive I have done countless times, but it is considerably more enjoyable with company. We started off in Davis, and drove all the way south to San Diego, with plans to head back north through Los Angeles and then Santa Barbara on our way home toward San Francisco, and for Lisa, then off to Cambodia.

This past summer we made a similar drive down I-5 but were met with very different views. January and February have been wet months in California and instead of wide blue skies we were met with gray ones. In September 2009 water was on a lot of people’s minds in California, and none more so than the farmers of Central California. The state’s three yearlong drought (with a fourth on the way) had been especially hard on the Central Valley’s agricultural heartland, and there were dusty reminders of those troubles everywhere you looked (see a previous post on California’s drought and water woes).

Caught in a downpour in Pacific Palisades, near Santa Monica

A Wet 2010

Driving down the same stretch five months later, the Central Valley was lush from what has so far been a wet winter. The golden straw grass covering the hills last September was now a deep green, and the wind swept dust now patted down into darker earthen browns. The drought in California is not over, however, and even in an El Niño year, reservoirs continue to be vulnerably low across the state. Experts are predicting that even with heavy rains so far this year, there is a ways to go before reaching average, if that happens. It is an interesting reminder of the psychological disconnect most people experience with water issues here: “if it is such a wet winter, then how are we still in a drought?”

Slippity-Do-Da, Slippity-Day

Tsunami evacuation route signs in San Diego

After Passing through the Grapevine and inching through Los Angeles, we reached San Diego late in the evening of our first day. Southern California had been on the receiving end of several large weather systems in recent weeks, and while the water was welcomed, its arrival has touched off a new set of concerns that comes with the dry years the region has endured. The fires that have scorched countless hillsides and homes in Southern California these last few years have also removed much of the vegetative cover that buffer against erosion and landslides during periods of heavy rain. Combined with extensive development and less permeable surface area to absorb heavy rains, a great deal of land in the region, and the expensive hillside homes upon it, is in danger of landslides. Given the popularity of building in this terrain throughout the state, the threat of entire hillside developments slipping from their foundations is considerable.

Standing atop the bluffs in Torrey Pines overlooking the Pacific Ocean, one can see what the natural course of erosion along the coast looks like. Without housing developments to inhibit and alter the land’s natural changes, the inlets upon inlets of water runoff that slither across the bluffs makes for a beautiful collage. Even in its dryness and slow steady decline into the sea, it is scenes like these that make more sense to me. Especially in contrast to the buffeted hillsides holding up multi-million dollar homes, seemingly in constant opposition to the land’s logical direction.

Another part of coastal Southern California that jumped out at me was the recent installment of tsunami evacuation signs in some coastal communities where they had not been present prior. While California and the West Coast as a whole does have an early warning system in place, these new signs are akin to a layer of fresh paint. Walking along the beach in La Jolla Shores you can see their merit. A great deal of the development there is right at sea level, and were a tsunami to come, much of it would be inundated. But tsunamis are not the only advance of water San Diegans will have to plan for. From my view the more gradual advance of sea level rise will also have to be incorporated into that as well, a slow tsunami if you will. It will be interesting to see how that all affects real estate in the area over the next 30 – 40 years.

Nature: ∞, People: ?

Driving up the PCH is one of the great joys of a California road trip, but it is also a dangerous road in parts. This time around the stretch from Santa Monica to Malibu was in a precarious state. I asked my friend Teresa to give Lisa and I a locals tour of erosion in the area and she was happy to oblige. Erosion, landslides and fires are a fact of life in these parts, and many of the residents offer personal anecdotes of the closeness to which a blaze approached or of the neighbors property that slid down the hill. Erosion along the PCH is particularly bad, and every time the rains come folks worry about the roads and the homes along the steep bluffs above them. In the 1960s a significant chunk of the hillside came down and transportation planners had to adjust the direction of the PCH to accommodate the land’s changes.

Here are some pics of what the hillsides look like now.

Every journey can teach us something new and more. I Look forward to exploring erosion and land use planning in Southern California more in future posts. But now, Santa Barbara awaits us.