Good luck LA...
It's raining in Los Angeles today. I have plenty of friends who joke about how even the smallest drop of rain in the city will make everyone immediately turn to the closest microblogging site and post about it to annoy everyone else on the planet. But today, five inches of rain are dropping on the city in some places, which is definitely crazy and actually quite dangerous.
I'm not there right now! Instead, I get to see the videos people are posting about it from the other side of the country.
Anyway, this is your reminder that the flood control infrastructure in Los Angeles is really, really cool and fun to read about. Here is a picture of me inside it:
There's a massive network of tunnels under the city which were constructed after the 1938 flood, which killed over 100 people. This same flood led the city to channelize the Los Angeles river and other rivers and creeks in the area, including Ballona Creek, the river along which I most often find myself cycling. So the city is prepped to remove a ton of this water! Searching up the 1938 flood stuff on Wikipedia is a fun read and leads to a bunch of other interesting articles about our flood control infrastructure.
I'm glad I'm not going to have the world's dampest Christmas tomorrow, but on some level I kind of wish I could be around to go look at Ballona later this week and see how crazy it gets: