Drought-stricken California has been thirsty for some rain and now we have a lot of it. Will this massive storm hitting the Bay Area help?
Peter Gleick, climate expert and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, told KCBS Radio's Liz Saint John on Sunday that certainly the storm will help, however there may be some caveats.
"It's been seven months with almost no rain and we're two years into a severe drought and this is a big set of storms," he said. "It's bringing a lot of water to Northern California, but we’re so far behind the curve that it’s too early to say if this is going to be a drought buster."
The torrential downpour is a refreshing break from the usual dry weather, but it would be more beneficial to have a light rain over a few days than a heavy rain all at once, Gleick said.
"What we really like is to get a little bit of rain for a long period of time so it can soak into the ground, it can charge the snowpack up in the mountain and refill our reservoirs," he explained. "When we get this rain in an intense storm like this you get severe flooding, you get traffic accidents, you get landslides."
With little to no vegetation holding soil together in areas recently affected by wildfires, soil is free to move, producing destructive mudslides that create potentially inhabitable living conditions.
Evacuation orders were issued in San Mateo County on Sunday for residents living in and around the CZU Lightning Complex burn scar.
As for the higher elevation, mountainous regions of California, Gleick doesn't believe this storm will produce a massive amount of snow.
"It is really early in the rainy season, which starts in the beginning of October and goes to April. We hope that we’re going to get more and more snow, but it's really too early in the season to know if we're going to get the big snowpacks that are going to sustain us," he said.
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