It’s understandable that people on the West Coast got a little freaked out last week when a hurricane/tropical storm was headed toward California. It hasn’t happened in a generation, so we’re not used to it. Thankfully, it turned out mostly OK. There weren’t any deaths, and property damage was minimal. There was a ton of widely spread misinformation about the storm, though, and some of it was pretty hilarious. Here’s some of what people got wrong this week.
“Nothing like this has ever happened before!’
In the days leading up to the storm, there was a lot of talk online and in the media about the unprecedented nature of Storm Hilary, but it turns out these kind of weather events have a lot of precedent. Southerly hurricane winds along the intertropical region happen often enough that they have a name: el cordonazo de San Francisco, or “The Lash of St. Francis.”
A storm bringing a ton of sudden rain to Los Angeles is so precedented, one of the most iconic and recognizable LA landmarks, the LA River, exists in its present form in response. LA turned its river into a concrete flood channel after the Storm of 1939, when St. Francis’ mighty lash killed 45 people in Los Angeles and flooded much of the city.
Before that, a hurricane scored a direct hit on San Diego in 1858. While climate change no doubt affected the severity of the 2023 storm, Hilary also arrived about when you’d expect a “storm of the century.”
Dodger’s Stadium did not flood
Photos and video of Los Angele’s baseball stadium taken during the storm are troubling. They seem to show Dodger’s Stadium as an island in the middle of an inland sea, and these images are not from photoshop—they’re real. But they’re still misleading. The heavy rainfall on the streets and parking lot around the Stadium caused an optical illusion. It looks like deep water, but it’s just shiny asphalt. Dodger’s Stadium is fine, and its drainage system held up like a champ.
LA’s subway tunnels did not flood
The video in this tweet from @MeixcanRugDealer with the heading “The LA Metro Station on Wilshire/Vermont is flooding from the storm” seems to show a disastrous nightmare of flood water pouring into LA’s transit system. While it was taken in Los Angeles, it’s actually footage of part of the Tram Ride at Universal Studios theme park: a little Hollywood special effects as opposed to a real disaster.
This footage of “A great white shark swimming by a gas station” is also from Universal Studios. So is this footage of a flash flood wrecking a small town. I got this totally real video of plane crashing during the height of the storm, though. It’s not from the Waterworld attraction at Universal Studios at all.
Dear Ted Cruz: That was not a shark swimming on the 405 freeway
Posting this photoshopped image of a shark swimming along on a highway has been an internet tradition since it was first posted in 2011. Back then it was supposed to be a flooded street in Puerto Rico, but it was connected to Texas flooding in 2015, Hurricane Matthew in 2016, and more—it basically gets whipped out whenever it rains. I would have thought that no one would be fooled by it, but at least one person was: Texas Senator Ted Cruz who reposted the image with the phrase “Holy Crap.”
This photo of a shark eating an airplane surprisingly did not fool Ted Cruz, however.
There actually was an earthquake during the storm
Given the misinformation flying about during the storm, you’d be forgiven for calling bullshit on reports of a “hurriquake,” but there actually was a 5.0 shaker during Storm Hilary.
It wasn’t just a weird coincidence, or proof that God tried (and failed) to kill LA, either. It was an unusual event, but not unheard of. According to the U.S. Geological Survey:
Very large low-pressure changes associated with major storm systems (typhoons, hurricanes, etc) are known to trigger episodes of fault slip (slow earthquakes) in the Earth’s crust and may also play a role in triggering some damaging earthquakes.
