Stay safe… Hope your luck continues. 25 miles is WAY TOO CLOSE for comfort!
North Inglewood near Ladera Heights
Then south Lawndale (across the street was Redondo … near Hawthorne Blvd and Artesia … South Bay Galleria area)
Was 15 and a sophomore at Inglewood High … remember that quake very well.
The two diabolical opposite feeling of new car ownership.
The new car smell, the modern wizzo features, the shiny perfect paint job, the feeling of satisfaction and success.
and
The constant horror of that first scratch or nick.
Yeah, got a good bit of thunder; from looking at the clouds, I think the most intense part passed just south of us, but there was a possibly navigable river flowing down the street! Thankfully no hail.
Or as I told Nisha, it rained hard enough that it cleaned the van of all the bird crap!
except August-September, when it gets to triple digits and the electric company shuts off the air conditioning for 6 hours so the grid doesn’t overload.
We have a thunderstorm with hail coming through right now. It’s pea-sized hail but there is enough of it that the yard looks like it has snowed. We are also in a tornado watch area this evening but I’m hoping that will pass without incident.
Stay safe … we will be under tornado watch again tomorrow.
YEA! No Bidet problems!!! 
And here in NJ, water no longer tastes salty, so I’m happy with that. (although still in the “abnormally dry” and almost “moderate drought” zone)
Back in late Nov / early Dec around here the ground literally shrunk. I’ve never seen that before.
I’m talking about the soil around sidewalks. You could literally see the difference. It’s all clay around here so it’s more obvious
Not anymore… We are super-saturated in Queens NYC
I’m thankful. Got scary for a min there. Didn’t rain for months
NJ is the “Garden State”. Not the clay I grew up with in NC. So didn’t see obvious shrinking. But you could still tell things were not normal; plants don’t lie.
The area I am in used to be swamp land 100 years ago.
To this day I will never understand why the builder didn’t take this crap out of here and get better fill / top soil.
Oh wait, he was a cheap ■■■■. That’s right…
TBH, if you’re looking to build on it, well compacted clay is not such a bad thing…
Builders don’t care about your garden.
Yea but it holds a lot of water and we had a lot of water problems here after we moved in.
Wonder what would have been cheaper for the builder - better fill or the $90K they spent in warranty work to stop the water from flooding our basement??? 
Had said disdainful contractor (I remember your mentions of its shoddiness as far back as the early versions of the “Shilling” PM/DM) foreseen that such aftermarket costs would be likely to entail for EVERY tract in the development, things might’ve transpired in a different direction - but I’d be inclined to wager a pretty penny that the C-BA (“Cost-Benefit Analysis”) which it (presumably) conducted before construction began includes an assumption that homeowners as diligent as you could be dismissed - from an accounting standpoint - as nothing more than a rounding error, and that certain machinations afforded by our Byzantinely-intricate Tax Code provides for offsets of such incurred costs which it found more-attractive (again, from a standpoint of initial outlay) - long-term sustainability be damned.
Sigh.
Funny. Still finding surprises with this place… Yesterday when I was powerwashing my garage stucco, prepping for paint this weekend, I took the gutter leaders off.
Guess what…??? They put the gutters on the house and stuccoed around the leaders instead of behind them. Bare cinderblock’s behind the leaders.
So, last summer, the little town in north-central Pa. where I’ve lived for half of every year since 2008, was hit by terrible, extremely sudden flash flooding from Hurricane Debby. Our houses were all in what looked like, from the hillside some of us escaped to on foot, a swirling caramel-colored ocean. I was stunned and wildly grateful when, as the waters started to recede, I came down off the hill and waded over to find that my mobile home was still in place, and even my car was still there! The house and the top of the driveway, it turns out, are a little bit raised up, thank God, so the living space of the house was completely intact. None of my neighbors in real houses were so fortunate. Two houses were knocked completely off their foundations, and every house around us suffered substantial damage to either house or contents or both. Many, many cars, sheds, garages, and livestock were washed away. Thankfully, there was “only” one human death, a young man who was tragically swept away while trying to help a neighbor. Hearing that made me realize how lucky I was, because I had been knocked off my feet by a strong current in one part of my driveway while making my way out, but thank God I was able to get back up and keep going.
It’s a poor area, and the damage was in a restricted area, so it took 6 weeks to meet FEMA’s required monetary threshold for disaster assistance, but it finally happened, thankfully, and Pa.'s governor pushed it through. FEMA doesn’t pay for as much as you think (and zero for us, of course, as 2nd-home owners), but they went door to door to help people apply and were a huge help for many.
It was so sad to go back there this month for the first time since mid-December and see how much repair work is still ongoing. One house on my street still has a porta-potty behind it; one house has a little trailer in the yard where the residents are living for now; another has a dumpster out front, all these months later.
When you see these natural disasters on tv, you feel terrible for the people involved, but you don’t realize, at least I never did, for how long they will still be affected, long after the donations and (numerous and wonderful!) charity groups have departed. I mean, even our fantastic volunteer fire department, which was out rescuing people off roofs, was itself flooded with 3 feet of water and lost tons of equipment. Small businesses lost huge amounts of inventory.
Not long after that, two siblings and some nieces, nephews etc living in Black Mountain, NC and the area, were hit by that apocalyptic Hurricane Helene you all know about, which made our Debby flood seem like nothing. No one could reach my brother, who lives in a mobile home, with power out for a week and cell towers down, so we spent a very frightening few days before the other relatives down there managed to get to him, after spending 8 hours in the car to take a usually 45-minute drive, because the major roads were all washed out. He and his cat were okay, thankfully, and the damage to his place was manageable.
Back to northern Pa. – so while I was up there the past two weeks, we had two Flash Flood Warnings – not “watches” – on successive nights as it rained and rained and rained. Thank God no flooding happened this time, but now I know that nothing will ever be the same again in our heads. I mean when you happen to glance out your back window and discover that your backyard is now a river, with stuff from under your deck floating by, the ground under your feet can never feel really solid again.
Thanks for listening, guys. I guess I just couldn’t hold it in any more. 
Once you’ve been through a warning that turned into “confirmed X” for anything higher than a severe thunderstorm, I’m not convinced you take the warning the same way ever again. I threaded the needle between 2 tornadoes by a few minutes a while back due to some traffic on the interstate. I STILL get a little squirrely when I hear a tornado warning for where I am.
That was September. We had to travel through the area–including Asheville–in January, and it was still a danger zone, most roads closed, clean up still very much underway, not even into the rebuilding stage yet. It was very tough to see, in a place that I spend time at least once a year, since childhood. We didn’t go into Black Mountain but follow both Montreat and Ridgecrest in their recoveries; those were both summertime playgrounds for me growing up (Montreat still is, and for my kids).
Since then, a few major roads have been repaired recreated. We will be traveling through again at the end of the month, and I am hopeful that progress has been steady.