CHAPTER 8: THE INDESTRUCTIBLES
“Make your mind up to wind up in sunny California” was a ragtime song popular in 1930.
Howard, Fred, and Vincent, Nat. “Make Your Mind up to Wind up in Sunny California,” recorded by Columbia, 24 April 1930, in Los Angeles, California.
On March 15 of the same year…“torn off and shot like arrows across space.”
Los Angeles Examiner, 16 Mar. 1930
The twister whisked away garages…”several persons were picked up bodily and hurled a distance of fifty to one hundred feet.”
“High Winds Batter Los Angeles Suburbs,” Los Angeles Times, 16 Mar. 1930
A half century later, the Los Angeles area experienced two tornadoes, mudslides, and an earthquake more or less simultaneously.
The following source describes a first tornado hitting the convention center and the second hitting the Santa Ana mobile home later in the day. This source also lists tornadoes, earthquakes, and flooding on the same day and gives numbers for buildings destroyed.
“Nature Batters,” Los Angeles Times, 2 Mar. 1983
Also:
“California Digs Out,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, 4 Mar. 1983
Also:
“Hillside Residents Evacuated in Slides,” Los Angeles Times, 3 Marc. 1983
Also:
“STORM: Twister Hits Central LA,” Los Angeles Times, 2 Mar. 1983
The tornadoes wrecked more than 120 buildings…
“Winds, Torrents Rake Southland,” Los Angeles Times, 2 Mar. 1983
…and made so much noise Angelenos feared a plane crash…
Los Angeles Times, 2 Mar. 1983, p. 13
…or an atomic bomb.
Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 2 Mar. 1983
In close to a century…wounded close to two hundred people.
The researcher Mike Davis tallied carnage for almost a century.
Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Metropolitan Books, 1998
A “tornado alley” exists in downtown Los Angeles, a result of the meeting of cold air, a curved coast, and mountains.
ibid. p. 157
Davis cites and quotes many experts.
Here, tornadoes strike with a frequency comparable to the Midwest.
Davis’ book led the author to this source:
Blier, Warren, and Karen A. Batten. “On the Incidence of Tornadoes in California.” Weather and Forecasting, vol. 9, no. 3, Sept. 1994, pp. 301–315., doi:10.1175/1520-0434(1994)009<0301:otioti>2.0.co;2
“A Climate for Health and Wealth Without Cyclones or Blizzards.”
“California: The Cornucopia of the World.” The Granger Collection, 12 Oct. 1876, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ca-cornucopia_of_the_world.jpg
An F2 tornado struck Pasadena late in January, 1918…
Monthly Weather Review. vol. 46, US Department of Agriculture Weather Bureau, 1918
…shredding streets and walloping a woman in the back with a rafter.
Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Metropolitan Books, 1998, p. 153
“Come to California, land of beauty, flowers, and sunshine…Southland’s arms are outstretched in cordial invitation to the East!”
Los Angeles Times, 27 Jan. 1819 (The whole issue is full of this stuff.)
…the tornado that destroyed two churches and uprooted a grove of orange trees.
The following source quote eye witnesses to the events:
Monthly Weather Review. vol. 46, US Department of Agriculture Weather Bureau, 1918
Instead the Times referred to the “tail end of a wind storm” that entertained Angelenos by “playfully picking up stray pieces of paper.”
Los Angeles Times, 27 Jan. 1819
Many folks in neighboring parts of the city never knew the tempest occurred.
Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Metropolitan Books, 1998, p. 155
Historian Kevin Starr describes the galvanizing feature of early California, gold rush California, as a “psychology of expectation.”
Starr, Kevin. California: a History. The Modern Library, 2015, p. 81
The sun shone over our heads three hundred days a year.
From the Western Regional Climate Center.
Data for clear days:
“Western Regional Climate Center.” WRCC, https://wrcc.dri.edu/wrccpub/htmlfiles/westcomp.clr.html/
Data for cloudy days:
“Western Regional Climate Center.” WRCC, https://wrcc.dri.edu/Climate/comp_table_show.php?stype=cloudy_days_avg&fbclid=IwAR3xCiO7mHT62guZzEG_v_NFos2BeQnzrcFNgxnVB60HhX4pG_CzD3hAWmM
“…hundreds of houses; houses where there used to be fields.”
Rodriguez, Richard. Days of Obligation: an Argument with My Mexican Father. Penguin, 1995, p. 218
At times in the 1960s, California’s population grew by fifteen hundred in a single day.
“The Mono Basin Project.” Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, http://wsoweb.ladwp.com/Aqueduct/historyoflaa/monobasin.htm
Link through Wayback machine: http://wsoweb.ladwp.com/Aqueduct/historyoflaa/monobasin.htm
“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”
Didion, Joan. Slouching towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, p. 4
California had one of the most effective advertising campaigns in history…
Sandul, Paul J. P. California Dreaming: Boosterism, Memory, and Rural Suburbs in the Golden State. West Virginia Univ. Press, 2014, p. 36
Greater Los Angeles fits over thirteen million into an area half as large…
[half as large as the ten thousand square miles of Inyo County]
Higgins, Lila, and Emily Hartop. “Looking for Nature in LA.” Boom: A Journal of California, vol. 4, no. 3, 2014, pp. 122–128., doi:10.1525/boom.2014.4.3.122, p. 123
“’‘Will you come back?’”
Parcher, Marie Louise. Dry Ditches. The Parchers, 1970
“…Nothing. She was told to go away.”
Austin, Mary Hunter. Earth Horizon: Facsimile of Original 1932 Edition. Sunstone Press, 2007, p. 308