Winds can be kind, lovely, or terrorizing. Today, our Masters of Disasters talk about them all, from Santa Ana to Diablo to hurricanes and beyond.
Who doesn’t like a nice breeze? A gorgeous zephyr? But the bad winds: They’re bad. And in Southern California right now, we’re going through some of the most notorious, bad winds of them all: the Santa Anas.
Today, our Masters of Disasters talk about the howling devil winds in honor of the spooky season. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times earthquake reporter Ron Lin, L.A. Times coastal reporter Rosanna Xia, and L.A. Times energy reporter Sammy Roth
More reading:
No emergency outages after Santa Ana winds prompted Southern California fire danger warnings
Why it’s been so warm and windy in Southern California this winter
Diablo winds can feed Northern California fires. Here’s how they form
This is an unedited transcript. We apologize for the mistakes. A corrected transcript is coming soon.
Gustavo: They blow hot, they blow cold. They blow soft. They blow bold. Winds!
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Gustavo: Who doesn't like a nice breeze? A gorgeous Zepher? Well, I'm outta synonyms for nice winds. Thanks for nothing, thesaurus.com. But the bad ones: They're bad. And in Southern California right now we're going through some of the most notorious, bad winds of them all. The Santa Ana's move aside spooky season cuz the devil winds are coming for ya.
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Gustavo: I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to the Times Essential News from the LA Times. It's Friday, October 28th, 2022.
Today we're talking winds. They calm, they annoy, they help us and they destroy. It's like the most gas lighting, nature phenomenon of them all, and they're becoming more and more gas lighting every year. Uh oh.
Gustavo: It's times like these that we turn to my colleagues of catastrophe, those profits of peril, our own Marvel cinematic universe of environmental eternals or Avengers or guardians or whatever. Yep. It's time. Masters of Disaster.
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Gustavo: Sitting as always in the earthquake chair is Ron Linn. And Ron, I heard just before this taping, you actually went through an earthquake.
Ron Lin: Yeah. Yeah. Still getting, uh, motion sickness from it.
Gustavo: Oy vey. No, I don't want earthquake season. We're already in spooky season. And speaking of spooky season, joining us is our Cassandra of the Coast, Rosanna Shaw, Rosanna. My uh, Halloween name is Gobo. Ah, Rey ah No. What's your, uh, Halloween name?
Rosanna Xia: Um, my Halloween name would have to be Roar Santa Rawr.
Gustavo: Oh my God, I am petrified. And finally, our energy master Sammy Roth. Sammy was the Dodgers losing into playoffs the greatest sports disaster of all time?
Sammy Roth: You know, all I have to say is it's less than four months till spring training, and I'm looking forward to next year as always.
Gustavo: What an optimist next time, wait till next year, right? Just like we said in Brooklyn back in the day. Yes. I am a ghoul from the past. Ron. Let's start with you, getting back to winds. For those of us non Southern California people, although I am from Southern California, so I don't know why I just said that, what are the Santa Ana winds and how are they formed?
Ron Lin: So Santa Ana's are like these strong winds that affect Southern California every fall and winter and sometimes in the spring and their cause. When high pressure hits the Great Basin, think like the four corners area of like Nevada and Utah, and that high pressure pushes air toward where else would you want to go to the lower pressure along the beach.
Gustavo: That just winds though. Like why do we make such a big deal out of them? I mean, the old timers used to call them the devil winds.
Ron Lin: Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, that's a thing about Southern California. There's like, we have this, this really long dry season, right? And uh, the Santa Ana wins can start as early as October, and so there's always this race. Like, are the Santa Ana winds gonna happen and then fuel these disastrous fires? Or are the rains gonna come first? And you know, what makes the Santa Ana wind so dangerous is that, you know, as the high pressure is sinking from the high desert, it's searching for a place to go. So, um, And as you know, there's lots of mountain ranges in Southern California. And so what that air is searching for a way to get to the beach, it's gonna get through those mountain passes. That's where the air gets compressed, dry, warm and, and faster. Think like putting your finger on a garden hose. And so the winds get scary fast. Like gusting like 50 to a hundred miles per hour. They can topple big rigs um, on freeways. They can carry hot embers and they can make fires go lightning fast.
Gustavo: Rosanna, how was your first experience with Santa Ana wins? Like had you heard about them before you moved to Southern California and when you saw them, were you like, Eh, it's no big deal. Or you're like, Oh shoot…
Rosanna Xia: Well, two things. One was my allergies. I had no idea that's what caused my allergies to go crazy in September and October. And I think the first mega Santa Ana wind event when I first moved out here was just going outside and getting blown, almost sideways, kind of a whoa. And then I saw a palm tree frond just on the ground, and I was like, Thank God that didn't hit my car.
Gustavo: Oh my god. Have you ever felt like trying to jump up and hoping that the wind blows you away? Or is that just me?
Rosanna Xia: That's definitely just you.
Gustavo: Oh my God. Well, Rosanna, ok fine. How bad do these winds get, especially since they tend to happen during fire season?
Rosanna Xia: Yeah, and it feels like a privilege to just complain about my allergies, but there was a huge study a few years ago that actually quantified this. Fires fueled by Santa Ana winds tend to spread three times faster than non Santa Ana fires, and they tend to kill more people. And the economic damage is like 10 times greater than most non Santana fires. And the key thing here is non Santana fires tend to burn in more remote areas like in national forests and more rugged wild. Santa A Fires on the other hand tend to cluster in coastal areas, as Ron said, and in the foothills, which obviously is where we've built all our major cities and neighborhoods. So yeah, these big wind fueled fires would just descend from the mountains through those mountain passes and onto the coast where more residents and homes and critical infrastructure are at stake. And the other thing I'd say about Santa Ana winds and wildfires is that when a fire spreads more rapidly because of the wind power, the fire itself releases way more energy, which makes it even harder to put out. So Santa Ana's don't just make these fires spread faster. They also make them more powerful.
Gustavo: And isn't there like cousins to the Santa Ana winds up in where you're at Ron? Like and aren't they called in the Bay Area and aren't they called Diablo winds or something like that?
Ron Lin: Yeah. Yeah. So basically in 1991, we had the Oakland Hills fire and the meteorologists up here, they couldn't stand calling them the Northern California version of Santa Ana winds, So, so they call 'em Diablos and it was a, it's a double entendre because it blows from the direction of Mount Diablo in the East Bay. And Diablo translates as the devil in Spanish.
Gustavo: You all should call 'em the hella winds. You know, because that's more Bay Area than Diablo cuz you're just ripping off Southern California.
Rosanna Xia: Ha. Booo!
Gustavo: Sammy; and this is what it gets me though about these Diablo winds,. Santa Ana wins. Like, we know how crazy they get. We know that they come out during fire season. We know that they topple power lines. That, And you know, those power lines then create fires. And like earlier this month, large parts of Southern California were hit with Santa Ana winds in the afternoon, which led to these notices of potential power outages. So at what point are we going to learn, like, okay, if there's gonna be winds, maybe we should refigure how we get energy you know, to all of our homes.
Sammy Roth: That, that's a good question. And I mean, there's more and more of a push as this stuff happens t think about burying power lines underground, where they can't be knocked over by the wind or can't have trees blown into them and sparking these fires. Traditionally it's been thought that undergrounding is, it's much too expensive. It can cost a million dollars. It already costs a million dollars a mile to build a long-distance transmission line, and, and underground is even more expensive than that. And these are costs that are ultimately paid for by you and me, right, by customers of the electric utilities that are building these lines, so that the argument in the past has been, it's too expensive, we can't afford it, that conventional wisdom is changing because of this destruction we're seeing and we're realizing, wait // we're paying all of these other costs from fires and from preventive power outages that are really damaging to businesses and to people who have medical equipment that they need electricity to keep running. So the conventional wisdom is changing and Pacific Gas and Electric, which has been at the heart of a lot of this, fires and preventive outages, they actually have a pretty dramatic plan now to, to bury, a whole lot of power lines over the next 10 years. It's expensive. Are they gonna be able to do it quickly? Are they gonna be able to do it at the cost they're promising? Those are open questions, but that's kind of at the center of their strategy now for, for how to prevent more of this stuff in the future.
Gustavo: Do winds go underground?
Sammy Roth: I haven't been down there to check, but let's, let's assume not and hope that we’re right.
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Gustavo: Let's hope that. We'll be right back.
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Gustavo: Okay, Masters. When the rest of the country thinks about winds, they don't think about our puny Santa Ana or Diablo. They're thinking hurricanes. And this year, Hurricane Ian was one of the worst ever, and this is not a joke, Sammy. Is there any way to harvest that extraordinary energy that hurricanes create and to make it into renewable energy?
Sammy Roth: Gosh, I've heard a lot of, uh, out-there proposals uh, for how to create renewable energy and harnessing the power of hurricanes is not one that has, uh, that has been presented to me as yet. When you look at what happened with Hurricane Ian, I mean, the winds here are quite destructive. The winds and the storm surge, but you had, you had more than 2 million people in Florida without power after Ian came through, you had hundreds of thousands of people in Puerto Rico without power after, after Maria a couple years ago, and in Puerto Rico took them a year to get the power back onto everyone on the island. And so when you look at these strong winds coming through and snapping power poles in half and throwing trees onto lines and onto transformers. I don't really think that getting power out of that's gonna be viable. It's more about how do you harden the system to at least prevent it from doing damage. Not that wind can't be useful as a power source elsewhere, as we know, but probably not the hurricane-strength ones.
Gustavo: All right, Elon Musk, there's another challenge for you. Rosanna in California, we have earthquakes, we have debris flows, debris flows instead of mudslides. We have fires. Dodgers into 2022 playoffs. So many disasters. But we west coasters, we don't have to worry about hurricanes. Right, right?
Rosanna Xia: Uh, thank you for saying debris flow, not mudslide. I will make a cocktail out of vodka and chocolate liqueur in your honor tonight. So, so hurricanes. Not to scare you, but a hurricane actually can hit California. It actually almost happened this year. So hurricanes feed off the tropical warm energy stored in the ocean, but usually by the time these storm systems make it to California. It hits the California current, which is cold, cold, cold. The current is literally like a hurricane repellent, but if the hurricanes move fast enough and if the ocean surface temperatures just offshore are like 75 degrees or hotter, which I should add, has become increasingly more possible with climate change and now, And our El Nino year is getting worse and worse and worse. So when all these factors come together, then yes, a tropical hurricane can indeed hit the California coast. And this actually happened back in 1939. It literally was the perfect storm. It snuck past Catalina and slammed into the coast of Long Beach. The storm dumped like almost six inches of rain over downtown la, which is way more water than LA can handle. The wind just ripped up the coast and the flooding was awful. Almost a hundred people died and people who were out on the water and their boats by Catalina just perished. You know, we forget this history, but yeah, like a hurricane actually hit California before. And the kicker to the story I should add is that this hurricane hit in late September, so the Santa Ana's also made things way, way worse.
Gustavo: Oy vey. It's like wind upon, wind upon wind But wind isn’t always bad. I mean, I mentioned at the very top, the nice light breezes. And Sammy, you mentioned earlier, yes, we can harvest wind as renewable energy, so don't we want more winds and faster winds for our future?
Sammy Roth: You want more winds and faster wind. Yes. Again, not, not hurricane strength probably. Uh, that, that's probably not gonna, I mean, those turbines are only only rated to go up to a certain speed. But just, uh, last week the Biden administration announced it's gonna host the first, uh, offshore wind lease sale off the coast of California. So we've got a lot of turbines here on land. If you've ever driven from, you know,, LA to Palm Springs or up through the Altamont Pass, I'm sure you've seen them. We don't have any off the coast. Um, and so for the first time, they're gonna be auctioning off the right to build in federal waters, a whole bunch of miles, like 20 miles offshore over this 500 square mile area. So probably in the next 10, 15 years, we're gonna start seeing big floating turbines popping up off the coast of the northern and central parts of the state.
Gustavo: Ok, so there’s some positivity here with winds, this is one question that I know all of you can answer. Because all of you cover climate change one way or another. And earlier this year when I noticed it was windy and SoCal, in a way in time, I've never remembered. I wondered in our super secret masters of disaster slack channel, if it was because of climate change. And our producer, Shannon laughed at me. She laughed at me, Oh, the pain. But then Ron, God bless your soul, you backed me up with a link and then like just left it at that. But here we are talking about winds. So I win. But again, seriously, as the climate changes, are we going to expect worse wind events? Like is that happening already?
Ron Lin: So I, I've been thinking about this and like, one thing that I keep on getting told by people is that Santa Anas have been a thing here for like forever, right? But there are a couple ways climate change could make things worse. So like, for one, the dry years are getting drier, so that means the Santa Ana's will have more time to do damage before some kind of rain arrives. And it is true that the last winter has been pretty windy. Our colleague, Paul Dubinsky, explained it this way. There was a big mass of high pressure that kept SoCal pretty dry and windy and super warm this past winter. Now is that big block of high pressure that kept us dry and windy, more likely to be there because of climate change. You could argue that could be the case.
Rosanna Xia: And to add to Ron's point, I think what I see a lot in kind of the climate change discussions is the idea of frequencies. Ss not only are things getting more extreme, but how frequently are they happening and is it, is the frequency increasing? And I would say that there have been signs of high pressure systems like what Ron just mentioned, increasing in frequency and the connections to our changing climate should not be ignored.
Gustavo: Sammy, you have the final word on this.
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Sammy Roth: Well, just to go back to hurricanes, I mean, this isn't a California problem quite as much. I'm learning here it is as Rosanna said, but not quite as much. Um, Climate change, definitely increasing the intensity of, uh, hurricanes. Maybe not the number of them necessarily, but seeing stronger storm events over the eastern, southeastern part of the United States.
Rosanna Xia: Yeah, and the ocean getting warmer in general in places that should not be warm at times when of the year, when it's not supposed to be hot.
Gustavo: We'll be right back.
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Gustavo: And now comes our traditional ending to Masters of Disasters, where we ask our masters what's bringing them joy in these terrible, spooky times. Rosanna, let's start with you. What's bringing you joy this month?
Rosanna Xia: So I've been loving the Halloween vibes that have been out in full force this year, and in the spirit of Halloween. I've got another joke for you, Gustavo. What do you call a typo on a tombstone,
Gustavo: Um, an epitaph.
Rosanna Xia: A grave mistake.
Gustavo: Oh my God. That's like the most obvious joke in human history. And I messed that up cuz I was thinking about the Romans and the Greeks. I'm glad it brings you joy. It brought me a little bit of joy. Sammy, what's bringing you joy?
Sammy Roth: Well you mentioned the Marvel Cinematic Universe earlier and today I watched the, uh, I think it was released by mistake, but saw the preview for the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday special, and that brought me some joy. I think that's gonna be good.
Gustavo: What's, uh, Grot gonna be doing?
Sammy Roth: Uh, repeating his name again and again. I have no doubt.
Gustavo: I am Grot. Maybe one day he'll say, I am grogu like a Freudian slip. And Ron, what's bringing you joy?
Ron Lin: So I did undergo that earthquake, uh, today just before taping. Uh, It made me nauseous, but the um, thing that I did get a lot of joy from after the fact was the fact that for the first time that I think, the earthquake early warning system worked for me. So I got a notice on my phone, a couple seconds saying that a magnitude 5.1 earthquake had occurred, you know, 50 miles away. And I was thinking, oh, it's probably another false alarm. And then a few seconds later it hit and it felt like a couple of toddlers, you know, jumping around a trampoline. But it did…
Rosanna Xia: How many toddlers are jumping on a trampoline for you? Ron?
Ron Lin: Jumping around on the car or whatever. But it did give me a sense that I actually, at least I knew what was happening. It did scare me that it felt like it was gonna go on forever. It only lasted for about 10 seconds for me. But, uh, it did give me a lot of joy that it worked.
Gustavo: Only Ron can take joy in terrifying earthquakes.
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Ron Lin: Yeah, download the app.
Gustavo: Download the app. There you go. And that's it for our Masters of Disasters. Ron Lin is the earthquake master. Rosanna Shaw is the coast. And Sammy Roth on energy beat. Thank you all my Masters.
Rosanna Xia: Thank you.
Ron Lin: Thanks.
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Gustavo: And that’s it for this episode of The Times, essential news from the L.A. Times.
Shannon Lin and Ashlea Brown were the jefes on this episode, Kinsee Morlan edited it and Mike Heflin mixed and mastered it.
Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistant is Roberto Reyes. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back Monday with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.
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