But those Californians are complaining about a little wind!
Fortunately nothing here worse than a few power flickers. And the city got around to digging the creek next to my apartment deeper, so I’m not really worried about a flood this year. And we did need the rain.
It’s definitely good that we’re getting a lot of rain finally, I don’t think anybody disagrees with that. However, this storm is very large by NorCal standards, and it is producing major flooding and power outage problems.
Seven-foot waves . . .
. . . on Lake Tahoe?
It’s now been raining, where I am, for 19 solid hours, and it’s still coming down nice and steady. I’m ready for a break tomorrow, I hope.
And as for the drought, the rain that falls down here does very little good. It’s the snowpack in the Sierra that we need. The last storm was too warm to add as much snow as one might have thought. I hope this one does better.
I’m soooo close, and yet soooo far. Not a breath of wind since noon and warm enough for shorts. :mad:
I was really hoping for snow tonight, but the storm hasn’t crossed over the crest yet.
It’s a big lake.
And storms can raise pretty big waves on large lakes.
It’s coming our way shortly!
What’s odd is the direction they are landing. From the news feed (I’m not up there right now) they are coming in pretty much straight from the south. They showed people surfing, but the waves only looked about 4 or 5 feet.
I’ve seen bigger waves come down from the north and crash on the south shore and been out on a boat in the center with easy ten-footers, but they weren’t breaking. Fun times!
We got 3.6 inches yesterday, and probably a bit more since our rain gauge got flooded.
The ground is now saturated and this rain is running off into reservoirs, which got a good bit more water - but they’re still low.
It was fun watching kids get one of their first ever “snow” days. Though it was pouring when I drove home last night, I got home faster than usual because of almost no traffic.
We moved from NorCal to the northeast in time for three of the biggest, most destructive storms to hit in decades. Par’n me if I play a few bars on my world’s smallest violin. 
I was more shocked by the recent report that this drought is the worst in California… in 1200 years. I lived through the last 40 years or so of increasingly severe droughts, and this one (from family reports as well as news) tops them all.
I suspect the last one of this degree coincides with the known gaps in the native population; IIRC, there is a decade-wide gap in the strata showing nearly zero human occupation around 1100-1300 BP.
I strongly suspect we are looking at the new normal for the Southwest and southern west up to Oregon or so, both in drought and occasional very powerful storms. The runoff into reservoirs is good, but it’s transient, and if this storm is too warm to build the snowpack much, it’s not going to make much of a dent in the dearth of dihydrogen monoxide.
The running joke on KROQ when I lived in L.A. was, no matter how heavily it rained (particularly if it was a heavy rain), ‘It’s not going to help alleviate the drought!’ 
(This is because no matter how heavily it rained, particularly if it were a heavy rain, the weather guessers on the news shows would say that.)
I was wondering about filling the reservoirs. I’ve seen news stories of homeowners building dams to divert water away from their property but has the state, or cities, added additional (temporary?) structures to redirect water towards the reservoirs?
We got almost 2 inches of rain yesterday in Sacramento, but all-in-all the storm wasn’t much to speak of here in town. There was some wind Wednesday night, but nothing like the 50 MPH gusts that we were warned about, and it rained steadily all day long, but nothing that the storm drains couldn’t keep up with. So it was a pretty good storm, but here at least it wasn’t exactly Stormapocageddonnado.
People were saying ‘worst storm in 20 years’ around here.
What a HUGE disappointment.
I heard ‘worst storm since 2009’ which seems like a much more accurate assessment. Seems like we used to get one or two of these big multi-day gully-washers virtually every year. What’s been unusual the past few years is that we haven’t gotten one. I regard this as more like a return to semi-normalcy ( hopefully ) in our winter weather patterns rather than an aberration.
I recall living in Berkeley during the winter of 1972-1973 (give or take a year), when we had exactly one rain storm, but that one storm lasted non-stop from November to March.
ETA: I also remember hearing about a major wet winter in 1982-1983 although I was living in balmy Hawaii at the time (where, of course, it’s always raining). When I moved back to California in winter of 1984, there was still a lot of visible flood damage that hadn’t been fixed yet. Lots of bridges still out.
The rain wasn’t too bad here in San Luis Obispo (we got about 2.5 inches) but it was REALLY windy. The newspaper says the wind got up to 50mph with gusts up to 63mph, and I believe it. We were lucky to not lose power - we saw some flashes/ heard some booms which we found out later was a tree taking down some power lines a couple of blocks away from our house. Lots of reports of trees falling down in the area, but fortunately no serious damage that I’ve heard of.
Damn. Feast or famine. My Wife and I were at Lake Tahoe Last Sept for the IronMan race and it got canceled because of the King fire.
It never rains in California, but girl, don’t they warn ya
It pours, man, it pours