From undersea volcano eruptions to toilets turned into sinks, our Masters of Disasters talk about their most memorable wins and fails of 2022.
This year, we saw a pandemic that just won’t quit, a face-melting heatwave and an underwater volcano eruption that wreaked all kinds of havoc. 2022 brought with it plenty of doom and gloom when it comes to natural disasters. But we also saw an effective new earthquake early warning system, a toilet sink that’s great at reducing water and energy use and more good news for our changing climate.
Today, our Masters of Disasters kick off a week of looking back the biggest wins and fails of 2022 by talking about the year’s most memorable disasters. But it’s not all bad: the scribes of scary also offer up some hope as we enter 2023. 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:
Massive volcano eruption in Tonga could wind up warming the Earth
How washing my hands with ‘toilet water’ cut my water bills in half
L.A. County coronavirus threat eases for now, but a second wave after Christmas possible
Why NASA’s new mission will study Earth’s water from space
Gustavo Arellano: 2022, man. 2022! It was the best of years. It was the worst of years. It was the whatever of years. What a year! This week, “The Times” is gonna go through some of the biggest stories of the past 12 months, focusing on politics and culture, and, of course, disasters. The gift that keeps on giving. Happy holidays.
Gustavo Arellano: I'm Gustavo Arelllano. You're listening to “The Times: Essential News from the L.A. Times.” It's Monday, December 26th, 2022.
Today we're starting our 2022-in-review by talking doom and gloom in the world of disasters. But also some hope as we enter 2023. It's times like these that we turn to my colleagues of catastrophe, those prophets of peril, our three wise scribes of scary. Yup. It's time for our…
Gustavo Arellano: “Masters of Disasters.” Musica, maestro!
Gustavo Arellano: Sitting as always in the earthquake chair is Ron Lin. Ron, what do you want for Christmas more? An end to COVID or an end to earthquakes?
Rong-Gong Lin: An end to COVID.
Gustavo Arellano: Oh, that's very, very nice of you. Also, joining us is our Cassandra of the coast, as always, Rosanna Xia. Rosanna for once I don't have a joke for you, but an honest question: If tuna's the chicken of the sea, what's the turkey of the sea?
Rosanna Xia: Turkeyfish.
Gustavo Arellano: Turkeyfish. Oh gosh.
Rosanna Xia: Look it up. They are terrifying. Very poisonous.
Gustavo Arellano: Oh boy. Just like actual turkey, for that matter, puts you to sleep and just probably dry as hell, too. And finally, our energy master, Sammy Roth. Sammy, let's be real. Wasn't the biggest disaster of 2022 the Dodgers not even making it into the World Series?
Sammy Roth: You know, I really shouldn't try to argue that one because I'm not going to be able to do it. You're absolutely right.
Gustavo Arellano: And sadly, Sammy is a big Dodgers fan, so I feel for you, man. Hopefully Santa's gonna bring you Clayton Kershaw. Like Sandy Kofax, we're 2023.
Damn, that’s mean.
Sammy Roth: Well, we got Clayton. I just wanna see Justin Turner back now. Then I'll be good to go.
Gustavo Arellano: Come on, Santa. We could do it. Masters, welcome as always. There's always disasters happening across the globe. Floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Really the worst disaster in Major League Baseball. And that's just for us non-masters. All of you masters must have what you think are some of the more prominent disasters. At least the ones that really weighed on you throughout 2022. So, Ron, you first. What are some of the disasters that are really gonna stick out in your mind for 2022?
Rong-Gong Lin: Yeah, it's gonna be Omicron, the pandemic. It’s every few months, it seems, we dare to hope the pandemic might be over. I remember last Thanksgiving and feeling very hopeful. And then Omicron appeared and it's continued to pummel us wave after wave. I mean, even though we knew that, like, the 1918 flu stuck around for several years, it's happening, you know, again. And I think part of the issue is, the message has gotten muddled in terms of, like, our optimism. And so, you know, sure, the first Omicron wave last winter was less deadly, but, it was still one of the most deadly of the pandemic.
COVID-19 is still one of the nation's most leading killers. And last winter, in the six-month period of that first Omicron wave, L.A. County lost 5,000 people. And yeah, that's smaller than the comparable period the prior year, of 17,000 people, but it's still a lot.
Gustavo Arellano: Yeah. Right now we're in a really triple flu, triple crown, if you will, of COVID-19, the flu, and then, what is it? RSV or something? It's not a boy band, right?
Rong-Gong Lin: That's right. Having that extra burden on our hospitals, it's another challenge that we have to face this winter.
Gustavo Arellano: Get boosted, folks. Wear masks, all that good stuff. Sammy, what disaster in the world of energy especially freaked you out in 2022?
Sammy Roth: Well, I guess you'd have to classify mine as a near-disaster because it was one of these times where we came very close to the edge on the electric grid in California and just barely managed not to go over. You remember when it was so, so hot? At the beginning of September and end of August, there was a 10-day period where it was just so, you know, record-breaking temperatures, and there was so much demand for electricity, people cranking up their air conditioners after sundown when all the solar power goes away. We had a period of 10 straight days. You remember those Flex Alerts, where every day the state was begging us all, please, please, please, you know, after 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., use less power. Help us avoid rolling blackouts.
We just barely managed to do it. But not without that one day where it was especially bad. Remember everyone got the emergency text message that they'd never done before? Those alerts to our phones? We were right up against the precipice of rolling blackouts at that moment, and there was a sudden sharp drop in demand, in electric use, so that kind of saved the day.
People, I think, got kind of, uh, inured to the Flex Alerts ’cause we're, there were so many of them, but that text message stopped disaster.
Gustavo Arellano: Wasn't that the time when you were in the Imperial Valley and it was like 120, or just like ungodly amount of heat.
Sammy Roth: That, that's right. I was down in the hottest part of the state, in the southeastern corner reporting that week on climate-change-related things. So it, frankly, for the Imperial Valley, it wasn't all that much worse than usual. I mean, it was, you know, mid-, you know, 115-ish down there a lot of those days and that's typical.
I mean, it's, it's other parts of the state that were seeing temperatures like that that were really unprecedented. One statistic for you: California's record electric demand, on the main power grid for the state, before that heat wave was like 50,000 megawatts. We hit peak demand of 52,000 megawatts during that heat wave.
So beat the old record by a whole 2,000 megawatts, which, which is just like enormous. And, and this is what's happening, is the planet heats up and we burn fossil fuels.
Gustavo Arellano: California is a leader in so many things. We have to become the leader in having oven settings to cool. Like Homer Simpson once said. Rosanna.
Rosanna Xia: Oh my god…
Gustavo Arellano: It's actually the first time I've mentioned “The Simpsons” on “Masters of Disasters,” I think. ’Cause I love “The Simpsons.” But Rosanna, what about you? What was one of the big disasters in your world?
Rosanna Xia: Biggest disaster of 2022 is definitely Twitter. I'm kidding.
Gustavo Arellano: No, boom. There it is.
Sammy Roth: As someone who spends way too much time on Twitter, I agree with you.
Rosanna Xia: But in all seriousness, there are so many disasters to choose from, so I was struggling with this. You know, hurricanes, the drought, and we were actually relatively lucky this year with wildfires in California. So my answer, I'm going to go with the underwater volcano that erupted in January near Tonga, which is in the South Pacific, kind of near Fiji. The volcano started erupting in December of 2021 in like a series of baby disasters.
And then on January 15th of this year, it exploded. The peak of the eruption blasted so loud, it set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. It was literally heard in Alaska, which is thousands and thousands of miles away. And that blast had rippling effects across the Pacific Basin. It was crazy for me to see.
It unleashed a tsunami on Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Japan, all the way to Peru, and the tsunami even hit California. Although the damage was not as bad as we feared, Santa Cruz Harbor was one of the hardest-hit areas because the tsunami came in on top of a high tide. The parking lot and streets were completely flooded and I think the damage ended up being about $6 million that day, and that actually was considered relatively not bad. For a tsunami.
Gustavo Arellano: I totally forgot about that volcano eruption. And right now in Hawaii, you're seeing the big volcano over there slowly starting to erupt for the first time in a couple years as well. Gosh, do we need more volcanoes erupting all over the world?
Rosanna Xia: Yeah. And this one was underwater, which was fascinating to me. And just such a sobering reminder. And I would say, like a lot of the science questions on this eruption near Tonga are still being studied. But I remember NASA saying that the eruption was hundreds of times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
And even though that eruption was underwater, it still blasted a huge amount of hot gas and air into the upper atmosphere, along with an unprecedented amount of steam, which actually likely caused a temporary spike in global warming.
Rosanna Xia: So it was not good, and it was definitely a sobering reminder for me of what rising water, even just a little bit of it can do to overwhelm our shorelines.
Gustavo Arellano: Gosh, the last thing we need is more volcanoes, and yet there's so many dormant ones all over the world and underwater. Uh-oh.
Gustavo Arellano: After the break, despite these disasters, our masters still have optimism.
Gustavo Arellano: OK, masters. Despite your line of work, despite everything we talk about here, what I think makes all of y'all incredible is that you always have room for hope.
That is just so incredible. But we need that four-letter word, all four-letter words, really, more than ever. So Rosanna, what's something that's making you optimistic heading into 2023?
Rosanna Xia: So I just covered a really cool story with our science reporter, Corinne Purtill, about a new satellite that NASA JPL just launched earlier this month. This new mission in space is going to totally transform the way we study and understand sea-level rise and flooding across our planet, and, ultimately, the consequences of climate change on the ocean and all our water systems in the world.
And so this satellite, nicknamed SWAT, is designed to measure all the water that covers the surface of the Earth. How it moves, how it interacts with the land, and just like way more details than we've ever had on how the ocean actually interacts with the shoreline. And this satellite is going to gather fresh data every 21 days. That's huge.
Traditionally, scientists have had to go out every month, every season to manually check tide gauges, measure the beach, check the water level of each lake and river, and then piece together this planet-wide water picture one study at a time. And this was just a really cool reminder for me that, in recent years, I have been noticing that NASA scientists have been turning their attention, increasingly, back onto our own planet. You know, with all their super-advanced technology, especially in this context of trying to understand climate change better, and that's just super exciting. The potential for big data here is just really cool.
Gustavo Arellano: But can SWAT swat sea-level rise?
Rosanna Xia: To be determined.
Gustavo Arellano: Hopefully. Get those space lasers. Come on, NASA. Sammy, what about you? What, what's making you optimistic about the energy world for 2023?
Sammy Roth: Well, you know, going back to the electric grid, one of the hopeful things that we actually saw, California had added thousands of megawatts of batteries to the power grid.
Since then, I think about 3- or 4,000 megawatts, pretty much starting from scratch. And that also really made the difference between having blackouts and not having blackouts. Those were batteries that were storing solar power during the day and sort of saving it up for the evening. More and more of those are getting built all the time. There's supply-chain problems, there's pricing issues right now, but that stuff is still happening and still hopefully putting us in a better position going forward.
Compared to the last time California was in that situation, two years before, August 2020, when you might recall, we did have rolling blackouts for two evenings. Meanwhile, California continues to take a lot of steps to try to address the root cause here, which is, climate change. Los Angeles finalized a regulation that's gonna require all-electric new homes to be built. So no, Gustavo, I know you're a fan of gas stoves, you've written about this, but from a climate perspective, if we start building, uh, you know, building housing and building commercial buildings without gas stoves, without gas heating, that's fewer emissions going into the atmosphere. So the city's taking action on that. The state's taking action on that. There's a lot of money in the budget this year in the state to help people replace their old gas appliances with electric ones. At the same time, you know, everything's a double-edged sword. That creates more demand on the electric grid. And I mean, we need to build a lot more renewable energy and a lot more batteries to, uh, help fuel all that stuff. So it's a tough one, but somehow we’ve got to figure out how to do it.
Gustavo Arellano: Well, look, if you could get electric stoves to have a “cool” setting so I could use that instead of my air conditioning, I'm all for it. ’Cause it’s all about electricity.
Sammy Roth: We'll get Homer Simpson on it.
Gustavo Arellano: Homer, get at it. Come on. Hey, he's nuclear power, so maybe he does have it.
Sammy Roth: Yeah. We should talk nuclear power too, that's related to this.
Gustavo Arellano: Well, that's going to be a whole other episode in 2023. But Ron, you're a dual master of earthquakes and pandemics, so you get to give us double hope. Go, Ron.
Rong-Gong Lin: Yeah, so, I actually have hope in the world of earthquakes. Um, yeah, crazy, right? But it's actually about what we can do about it. So, L.A. has this earthquake-safety law that requires apartment buildings, and other types of buildings, to be retrofitted. And the good news is that 8,000 of 14,000 buildings have been retrofitted, and that's like a billion dollars worth of retrofits and it's a super-big deal. You might know these specific apartment buildings that I'm talking about as dingbats.
Gustavo Arellano: Weirdest name for an architectural design in history: dingbats.
Rong-Gong Lin: Crazy, right? These are the ones with the carports on the ground floor and the upper floors are propped up by essentially skinny toothpicks. And so during the 1994 Northridge earthquake, it's like, it's getting old, but you know, an apartment collapsed and 16 people died. So getting more of these buildings retrofitted will save lives.
Now there's still a lot more work that needs to be done. A lot of smaller cities don't have this requirement. L.A. has a requirement to retrofit concrete buildings, but they have a longer deadline, and so they aren't really done. And most cities don't have a requirement to evaluate and retrofit steel skyscrapers, and even just one of those collapsing would be a disaster. But there's a lot of hope that, you know, maybe as the pandemic does recede, that more attention can be paid on earthquakes.
Rosanna Xia: Ron, this was from the law that was passed in 2015, so 8,000 buildings have been retrofitted in the last seven years?
Rong-Gong Lin: Yeah.
Rosanna Xia: I'm trying to do the math here live, which is really embarrassing, but that sounds like, that feels like a lot in terms of the way we usually build and pass permits and just get things done. Like that's, that is hopeful.
Rong-Gong Lin: Yeah. And it's, it's crazy because, just, you know, before 2015, the word at City Hall was that it was a, you know, political suicide, to do something like this. And of course, some of the people who said that it was political suicide have since been indicted for corruption. So things change.
Gustavo Arellano: Oy vey! Political disaster. OK, so you gave us hope on earthquakes, but what about pandemics?
Rong-Gong Lin: I mean, I am hopeful about the pandemic. Things could go awry, but the good news is that pandemics do eventually end at some point. And the other thing is that, I wish more people got the booster, but the fact that our booster this fall is a good match for the circulating strain, that gives me hope that people do have the tools to help protect themselves. And also wearing that mask. I know people don't like it, but it makes sense that masks work.
Gustavo Arellano: It works. It works. It works. It works. It works. Speaking of masks, what would be, for each of you, your ideal disaster kit? In your fields, that Santa should be giving all of us, uh, come Christmas?
Rong-Gong Lin: Yeah. So for earthquakes, I would hope that Santa is a, is a phone engineer.
Gustavo Arellano: What?
Rong-Gong Lin: Because one of the things that came up was that California has this earthquake early warning system, and if you have an Android phone, it's automatically installed. But if you have an iPhone, you have to download the MyShake app from UC Berkeley, which is great, but it would be a lot better if it was automatically installed as it is in Japan.
Gustavo Arellano: Well, I'm not going to do it because I'm from UCLA and I don't like UC Berkeley. So there. Rosanna, what do you want Santa to give out for a sea-level-rise kit?
Rosanna Xia: My first thought was actually Louis Sahagun's response in our last episode of “Masters of Disasters,” an inflatable raft. I'm going to give more thought to this. The first thought was I really hope that everyone gets a chance somehow to go to the beach, or to just reconnect with the coast, nature, wherever is nature near where you are. And I think that part of our responsibility to climate change and to just adapting to climate change starts with our relationship with nature. And I hope that you can gift yourself the ability to reconnect with nature at some point.
Gustavo Arellano: Boom. Sammy, what is in your Santa energy kit?
Sammy Roth: Well, first I wanna say the real biggest gift for me would be if everyone followed Ron's advice and kept wearing a mask, uh, when appropriate. I would appreciate that as well. That would be helpful.
In terms of energy stuff, I was just reading, um, this article by our, our L.A. Times co-worker Jeanette Marantos, who writes about saving water and plants and gardening. She had this fascinating thing about, uh, sort of the gift guide about this toilet sink device where you put this sink, like attach it to the top of your toilet tank, and every time you flush, rather than going to the, sink to wash your hands, the water that's gonna refill the toilet tank to replace the water from your flush, first it flows through this toilet top sink and you wash your hands with it, and then that water filters down into the toilet tank. Jeanette says it's amazing once she got past the, you know, “this is a little bit weird” factor, but saves a ton of water and it's energy-related because one of the best ways to save energy and to ease the strain on the power grid and burn less fossil fuels, et cetera, is to use less water, because it takes so much energy to move water around, up hills through pipes into your homes. Water use accounts for, I wanna say something like 15 or 20% of energy use in California. It's, you know, when you think about the aqueducts and the canals, that's a rough figure. But anyway, it's $83.99. If anyone wants to, uh, get me that for Hanukkah, I'll take the toilet sink.
Gustavo Arellano: Wow.
Rosanna Xia: I wish everyone could see Ron's face right now, as Sammy was describing this toilet sink.
Gustavo Arellano: He’s incredulous.
Rong-Gong Lin: The look of revulsion to like joy.
Gustavo Arellano: Hey, you know.
Rosanna Xia: The journey within that minute was incredible. Just watching your face.
Gustavo Arellano: Hanukkah, Christmas, all the gifts of giving. This is a time, more, and we're gonna give you more, after the break.
Gustavo Arellano: And now comes our traditional ending to “Masters of Disasters,” where we ask our masters what's bringing them joy. Rosanna, let's start with you. What's bringing you joy in this final month of the year?
Rosanna Xia: So I feel like it is only appropriate for our last episode of the year to end with a joke.
Gustavo Arellano: Oy vey, I love ’em.
Rosanna Xia: Gustavo, how do you split the ocean in half?
Gustavo Arellano: How do you split an ocean in half? With a proton blaster?
Rosanna Xia: With a seesaw.
Gustavo Arellano: Oh my God. They're like the most obvious jokes, but they're funny and I'm just so clueless. I never get them. Thank you for bringing me that joy, Rosanna.
Gustavo Arellano: Ron, what's bringing you joy?
Rong-Gong Lin: The moon is bringing me joy.
Gustavo Arellano: The moon?!
Rong-Gong Lin: Up in the Bay Area, there's only one, uh, day, a year that the beacon on top of Mt. Diablo is lit and it's to commemorate Pearl Harbor. But this year the moon came up right next to Mt. Diablo, like as the beacon was being lit. And so all these photographers in the Bay Area, you know, captured these great photographs of that and that gave me a lot of joy.
Gustavo Arellano: What's your favorite moon lyric?
Rong-Gong Lin: Oh, I don't know anything about songs, but I do know that beacons bring me a lot of joy.
Gustavo Arellano: “Moon river… How high the moon.” I'm just making up moon songs. Finally, Sammy, what's bringing you joy?
Sammy Roth: Well, the, uh, the third season of “His Dark Materials” just got underway on HBO, which is bringing to the screen, for the very all-time favorite books, the “Amber Spyglass” by Philip Pullman. So just watch the first episode. It's wonderful. And, uh, if you're a fan of that book series, check it out ’cause, uh, that'll bring you a lot of joy, too.
Gustavo Arellano: Ooh, HBO. Always wonderful stuff. And of course these are just some of our masters, but we have an entire roster of masters who gave us all sorts of joy during 2022. Here’s water master Ian James, master-in-training Haley Smith and master maestro Louis Sahagun.
Ian James: I've felt really happy seeing all the rain we've been getting. We've just gone through California's driest three years, and even though we're still in the drought, the creeks have been running. There's snow in the mountains and I've been watching the hills turn green. And it's wonderful to see the changes.
Hayley Smith: A lot of my joy this year came from really small moments with other people. I'll never forget this one woman, Harlene, who I met in a shelter during the McKinney fire. She was 81 years old and had just lost her entire house to the fire. But somehow in the scramble, she had managed to save a trunk full of costume jewelry. And even though she had lost all of her other belongings and her clothes, she took my hands, laughing, and said,”Well, I'll be naked, but at least I'll be laden with jewels.” And that kind of spirit, even in the face of the worst situations, is just amazing. And it feels like a real privilege and often a real joy to be able to connect with people in that kind of way.
Louis Sahagun: I was born when much of Los Angeles County was still wild. My first memories were of a patch of wilderness surrounding my family's home in a farmworker's camp east of Los Angeles. What brought me joy in 2022 was a visit to the area where my memories kicked in, nearly seven decades ago. Surprisingly, it is still a place where barn owls roost in century-old sycamores, and frogs sing in the spring.
Gustavo Arellano: Joy to all of us. Ron Lin’s the earthquake and pandemic master. Rosanna Xia is the coastal master. And Sammy Roth is our energy master. Thank you all my masters and, uh, drink a lot of hot stuff, I think.
Sammy Roth: Absolutely.
Rong-Gong Lin: Thanks.
Rosanna Xia: Haha. Thank you.
Gustavo Arellano: And that's it for this episode of “The Times: Essential News from the L.A. Times.” David Toledo was the jefa on this episode and Mario Diaz mixed and mastered it. Our show is produced by Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian and David Toledo and Ashley 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 Wednesday with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.