Mike Ginn
Hurricane Hilary made landfall in Southern California on Aug. 20 and boy did it disappoint many across the SoCal region.
Hurricane Hilary, later downgraded to a Tropical Storm, was the first tropical cyclone to hit California since 1939.
After weeks of warnings from meteorologists explaining how this storm was going to be powerful and dangerous, it ended up just being another rainy day.
Before the storm hit California, people were warned that they would get battered with 30 to 50-mile-per-hour winds, with heavy rain and potential flooding but to no avail.
Of course, there were areas in the SoCal region that were hit harder than others like the desert cities which saw some flooding but most just saw loads of rain dumped on them.
Some across SoCal were somewhat excited to experience a tropical cyclone for the first time in their lifetime despite all the warnings.
Others seemed to be preparing for the worst by placing sandbags in front of doors and stocking up on non-perishables.
During the storm, many of us SoCal residents were constantly being told that squalls of strong winds and rain were going to hit us eventually after people began to question the severity of the storm, but none came.
After this, we saw many people seemingly mocking the cyclone by surfing at the beaches, riding on floaties in slightly flooded streets, people jumping in their pools, and people cooking on the grills outside like actor and comedian Bert Kreischer.
Los Angeles did see 3.34 inches of rainfall come down which does surpass the average rainfall LA would see in August.
During the storm Los Angeles was hit with a natural disaster they are more familiar with, when they were hit was a 5.1 magnitude earthquake which seemed to frighten some people more than the actual storm.
The aftermath of the storm in the metropolitan areas wasn’t as catastrophic as meteorologists predicted it would be.
Some branches did fall but that would be the full extent of the damage in most of the metropolitan areas in SoCal.
Looking back at the warnings and media coverage of the storm it truly seems like the weather experts overpredicted this storm and caused unnecessary panic among a few people.
Some people were so afraid of what was to come that many were panic buying a day before the storm made landfall.
Thankfully the cyclone was not anywhere nearly as bad as they had predicted it was going to be.
In the future, meteorologists and weather experts should proceed with caution when predicting major weather events that could be life-threatening because we could see another surge of panic buying, which does no one a favor.