El Scapegoat

You don’t like this story? Blame El Nino.

The ocean-warming meteorological phenomenon that wreaked havoc on Los Angeles before fading away last month has been blamed for just about everything else that turned out bad this year.

Not that this article necessarily falls into that category, mind you. Certainly not a story that mentions a flood of Italian trousers, losing an Academy Award, traffic jams on the Ventura Freeway and hangnails in the same sentence.

Each of those things has been blamed on El Nino.

Ditto for invading Argentine ants that marched by the millions through Los Angeles homes, causing housewives to call out the swat team.

Piano out of tune? It’s because humidity from El Nino caused the piano wires to go slack.

Lousy skiing season? It’s because El Nino produced a thick and sticky snowpack in the San Gabriel Mountains. And thin and patchy coverage on slopes farther east.

Golf game fall apart? It’s because the grass on putting greens was tougher and less resilient, thanks to El Nino.

El Nino translates literally as “The Child.” The whipping boy is more like it.

“El Nino will be blamed for just about everything--your hurt toe, tennis elbow and a higher grocery bill,” Dan Basse, executive vice president of AgResearch Co., a Chicago research firm, predicted last September as El Nino conditions were developing over the Pacific Ocean.

He was right. Since then, newspapers, magazines and computer Web sites have bulged with fingers pointing the blame at El Nino when anything went wrong.

“It’s an easy scapegoat,” said Michael Glantz, senior scientist the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Glantz is a veteran El Nino researcher who this week will convene a symposium on El Nino’s little sister, La Nina, in hopes of helping determine what that weather phenomenon can be blamed for.

You can’t blame Glantz when he says he’s happy the weather cycle is changing. He has routinely fielded weird weather questions for the past year.

“As a person who has been called by everybody under the sun, I’m glad El Nino is over,” he said. “We learned a lot from it this year. One of the things we learned is we don’t know all we think we know about El Nino.”

One thing he’s sure of, however: “Not everything being blamed on El Nino is the result of El Nino.”

Take hangnails, for instance.

Computer users in a California chat group that Glantz came across were blaming El Nino for an outbreak of hangnails.

Slightly more plausible was the contention of some in Montana that El Nino was to blame for an increase in snakebites, he said.

“The reasoning is because there was a dry winter, for some reason there was a plethora of insects and the field mice followed them into urban areas and the snakes followed the field mice and came in contact with humans,” Glantz explained.

Like snakes following mice, people all over the country have devised their own pathways of logic to explain how El Nino has affected them.

In South Carolina, heavy rains left unusual amounts of standing water, which produced mosquito larvae, which created clouds of hungry mosquitoes, which is creating a miserable summer for those who enjoy backyard barbecues.

Link to Disease

El Nino is blamed for outbreaks of Lyme disease on the East Coast and deadly hanta virus in the Southwest. How? Its rains produced thick grass, which led to bumper crops of rodents, which produced hordes of ticks that carry Lyme disease and hanta virus.

El Nino is blamed for causing malaria in places like Bolivia, and for a cholera scare in Ecuador and Peru. Malaria came from higher-than-normal numbers of mosquitoes spawned in standing rainwater. Cholera was spread by flooding that caused garbage dumps and sewage ponds to overflow.

El Nino is blamed for drought conditions that led to stubborn forest fires in Mexico, Australia and Indonesia. And the Indonesian fires, which burned out of control for months and caused smoke to blot out the sun in parts of Southeast Asia, have been tied by some to the Asian economic crisis.

El Nino was fingered as the culprit for coffee harvest problems in Indonesia, the rising price of palm oil in Southeast Asia and sagging corn crops in China and South Africa.

A drought brought on by El Nino cut into corn and bean crops in southern Mexico. And El Nino was blamed for a drop in catches of anchovies and sardines off Peru--which led to higher costs for cattle farmers who use anchovies and sardines as livestock feed in places as far away as Ireland.

Drought brought on by El Nino destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of Colombian corn, soybeans and sorghum and reduced lamb and cattle yields in New Zealand.

In California agricultural areas, El Nino storms flooded farms, destroying strawberries, lettuce and artichokes.

In Ventura, fishermen blamed El Nino for virtually wiping out last season’s squid harvest. Warm coastal waters drove hundreds of millions of pounds of squid to colder waters farther north in the Pacific.

Farther inland in Ventura County, El Nino caused a 120-mile detour for mountain residents north of Ojai. One of its storms sent a 200-yard-wide slab of dirt 40 stories high across California 33, closing it to traffic.

El Nino almost closed down Lake Havasu City. It was blamed for sending in a swarm of grasshoppers that swept across the Colorado River and covered the walls of businesses in the tiny tourist town in April.

It was also blamed for the invasion of pelicans that brought traffic to a halt on the streets of Arica, Chile.

El Nino storms caused flash flooding in Baja California in early February that killed 13 people and damaged hundreds of homes in Tijuana and Rosarito.

In Laguna Beach, another El Nino storm was blamed for mudslides that damaged more than 200 homes and left two men dead.

“I ended up doing the breaststroke in the mud,” recounted Eldon Seterholm, 74, who survived one February onslaught.

Heavy surf blamed on El Nino storms caused one house to collapse next to Broad Beach Road in Malibu in early February. Inland, a Chatsworth man died when his car plummeted 60 feet into a ravine when a bridge collapsed after an El Nino rainstorm.

The same El Nino storm felled a landmark 1,000-year-old oak in Encino. Two men were rescued by helicopter from the top of a pickup truck that was washed off California 138 in the Antelope Valley area.

Mudslides created by an El Nino deluge in the San Fernando Valley ripped a 200-foot gash in a West Hills hillside, sending a garage sledding down the slope and damaging five homes.

Two California Highway Patrol officers died in late February when El Nino flooding washed out part of California 166 and their car plunged into a river.

In that same storm, two Pomona College sophomores were killed on their way to class when a eucalyptus tree toppled and smashed into their sports utility vehicle.

Tornadoes spawned by El Nino conditions knocked a 70-foot-tall acacia into a Long Beach home and damaged a mobile home park in Huntington Beach.

“Everything that happened this winter [was] El Nino-related because it is part of what created the weather pattern over the United States,” explained meteorologist Steve Pryor of WeatherData, a firm that provides forecasts for The Times.

Outbreak of Jokes

By spring, El Nino was causing an outbreak of jokes. Some deliberate, others not.

Valerie Johnson and the Blues Doctors recorded a catchy tune called “Blame It on El Nino,” which got air time on Dr. Demento’s radio show on KLSX-FM.

A Beaverton, Ore., firm marketed a $19.95 battery-operated animal toy that wears a badge saying, “My name is El Nino. You can blame everything on me,” and emits a wolf whistle when anything crosses its path.

A clothing firm held a sale, announcing in an ad that “the closing of our Orange County warehouse, and the terrible El Nino storms, has caused an overflow of the finest Italian clothing.”

The 49’rs Tavern on Pacific Coast Highway began fining patrons 50 cents each time they mentioned El Nino. Owner Kevin Russell said he was tired of all the storm talk.

Lakewood school librarian Laurel Daley told “Only in L.A.” columnist Steve Harvey that when she asked Gompers Elementary School children what season it was, one boy replied authoritatively: “El Nino.”

When late-night television host David Letterman commented on his show that he was “sick that once again Barbra Streisand was snubbed” by the Academy Awards, guest Billy Crystal responded: “Well, you know, El Nino.”

Claremont educator Susan Nelson joked about difficult parents in the spring edition of Webb Schools Magazine: “The El Nino parent--blows a lot of wind, makes waves, causes a lot of damage,” she wrote.

Researchers in Boston blamed El Nino for making our days longer--slowing Earth’s rotation by almost one ten-thousandth of a second.

An educator in Australia suggested that past El Nino weather cycles were probably to blame for such historical occurrences as the French Revolution and Europe’s Black Plague.

As this El Nino faded away, its memory lingered on. Traffic was jammed on the Ventura Freeway last week as El Nino-caused potholes were repaired on four southbound lanes in Woodland Hills.

And entomologists in Los Angeles blamed El Nino for an outbreak of flies.

Fortunately, El Nino is also being blamed for an outbreak of spiders--which eat flies.