SoCal sees two ‘thousand-year’ storms within weeks. More could be coming
..Fast-moving storms have inundated portions of Ventura, Los Angeles and San Diego counties, flooding neighborhoods, spurring water rescues, triggering evacuations and stunning experts with their strength and magnitude. On Dec. 21, a storm barreled through Oxnard and delivered a month’s worth of rain in less than an hour, officials said. And this week, a similarly historic event drenched San Diego with more rain in a few hours than the area typically sees in all of January. Both were called “thousand-year events” — or events with 0.1% likelihood in a given year — and prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare states of emergency. Now, as Southern Californians continue to recover from the buffeting, some experts warn that El Niño, climate change and seasonal patterns have made such storms more likely to occur than ever.