Flooding in Los Angeles

Some of you may have heard that Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California has been getting an unusually high amount of precipitation for December.  Wednesday was the last day of a six day storm (storm here just means constant rain, at times heavy).  I had to go out during one of the heavy showers.  I'd been out in heavy rain before in L.A., but I'd never seen a road flood like this.

I should have taken a video as the photos do not capture how fast it was flowing and how deep it was.  It was the whole width of the right lane.   This is Fairfax Avenue near the Farmer's market, and I needed to be on the other side of it.  I couldn't get across.  I could have done so without dying, but I would have been shin-deep in water and would have risked falling due to the speed it was moving at.  It wasn't a localized area either, the road was really functioning as a river.

Some larger vehicles were blasting through it here and there:

The infrastructure just doesn't handle rain very well here.  I've been out before in heavy rain and the eaves troughs of large buildings sometimes empty directly onto the sidewalk, and you have to leap a large fire-hose like blast of water that is pointed directly over your path.

Of course, it could just be that southern California is turning me into a wimp.  It's back to sunny and temps of around 18C / 65F, which is what I signed up for, so it's all good now.