The Sun Takes a Holiday
“It’s a better day than a hot day,” Pat Velasquez, 67, said Tuesday as he clutched a basil plant at a San Gabriel garden center and prepared to head home to Azusa and put trowel to turf.
Dan Bergman, a Venice resident originally from Sweden, heartily disagreed. The unusually cool weather, he said, “taps into old memories of bad summers in Sweden.”
Sure, serious weather watchers will tell you it’s normal for clouds to occasionally come to town in midsummer, cooling the infernal valleys, rain-spotting newly detailed cars and sending tourists to the malls for the long pants they never dreamed they’d need--not here, not now.
But as the National Weather Service was issuing a flash-flood warning for Palm Springs on Tuesday, and people were still chatting about Monday’s mini-twisters in the Antelope Valley, it sure didn’t feel normal.
To many, the cooler weather offered some relief from the beating July sun.
At Hurricane Harbor, a water park in the usually sweltering Santa Clarita Valley, the weather wasn’t going to stop David Berman. Giggling, hair sticking up at funny angles, trunks clinging to his thin frame, the 10-year-old reveled in the light drizzle and cool temperatures. “With the rain, you don’t burn your feet on the hot cement,” he said.
Suzanne DeShields drove from Palmdale and said she didn’t give the rain a second thought. She said, after taking a 75-foot plunge down a vicious water slide known as Venom Drop, that she knew it would mean fewer people and shorter lines.
“I kind of figured people would stay away,” she said. “It’s funny that they do because . . . you’re already getting wet.”
In the San Gabriel Valley, residents were coaxed from their air-conditioned homes and into Armstrong’s Garden Center in search of new plants for their gardens.
“I don’t like too much sun,” said Louise Lou as she considered buying sculpted fountains and ferns for her Arcadia home’s backyard. The cool weather lured her out of the house and made her resolve to do some gardening.
Experts reiterated the point that the current weather pattern is quite typical.
Also typical, they said, is the perception that the pattern is atypical.
“People always try and find answers when sometimes it’s just average weather,” said John Sherwin of WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for the Times. “Is it El Nino? Is it global warming?”
It reminded him of a call he’d gotten the day before from a reporter in Dallas.
“They were wondering why it was so warm there. It was 97. And their average for that day was 97. They were writing a story on why it was so warm.”
Actually, this dank ceiling, unlike the Pacific-spawned June gloom, rolled over the deserts from the Gulf of Mexico. Often, the high mountains flanking Southern California keep such weather system out, but this week a renegade wind from the southeast pushed it right over the passes, Sherwin said.
The far-ranging cloud cover will diminish another oft-forgotten summer phenomenon that could have been sparked by the unusual humidity: “If there was actually sunshine today, there would probably be enough heating during the day to create thunder storms.”
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At the Arroyo-California Carwash in Pasadena, the prospect of rain didn’t deter one car collector from getting his brown beast of a 1971 Oldsmobile waxed.
Allowing not a crack on his sprawling vinyl dashboard, Frank Dipaola of Pasadena had done his share of auto detailing over the years--and he has learned that rain doesn’t mean a bad wax day.
“As long as you wipe it off and the sun doesn’t bake it, you won’t get water spots,” Dipaola said. “So what I do as soon as the rain is over, I wipe it down.”
Some were more perturbed by the shift in weather. Leslie Notghi brought her two young children from Beverly Hills to fish for the first time at the Santa Monica Pier.
“It looks like we picked the worst day for it,” she said. “I thought I’d come down here and get a tan, but not today.”
Times staff writers Nicholas Riccardi and Eric Slater and correspondents Greg Sandoval and Sue McAllister contributed to this story.
