What People Get Wrong This Week: Hurricane Hillary Misinformation
Understandably, people on the West Coast got a little scared last week as a hurricane/tropical storm headed towards California. This hasn’t happened in a generation, so we’re not used to it. Fortunately, for the most part everything worked out. There were no fatalities and material damage was minimal. However, there was a lot of widespread misinformation about the storm, and some of it was pretty funny. Here are some of the mistakes people have made this week.
“Nothing like this has ever happened before!”
In the days leading up to the hurricane, there was a lot of talk on the Internet and in the media about the unprecedented nature of Hurricane Hillary, but it turns out that similar weather events have many precedents. Southerly hurricane winds in the intertropical region occur often enough that they have a name: el cordonazo de San Francisco , or “St. Francis’ Whip”.
The storm that brought a ton of sudden rain to Los Angeles is so precedented that one of Los Angeles’ most iconic and recognizable landmarks, the Los Angeles River, exists in its current form in response. Los Angeles turned its river into a concrete flood channel after the 1939 hurricane, when a mighty St. Francis strike killed 45 people in Los Angeles and flooded much of the city.
Prior to that, a hurricane struck directly at San Diego in 1858. While climate change has undoubtedly affected the strength of the 2023 storm, Hilary also arrived around the time the “hurricane of the century” could be expected.
Dodgers Stadium was not flooded
Photos and videos of the Los Angeles baseball stadium taken during the hurricane are alarming. They seem to show Dodgers Stadium as an island in the middle of an inland sea, and these images are not photoshopped – they are real. But they are still misleading. Heavy rain on the streets and parking lots around the stadium caused an optical illusion. It looks like deep water, but it’s just shiny asphalt. The Dodgers stadium is in order and its drainage system is holding up like a champion.
Los Angeles subway tunnels were not flooded
The video in this tweet from @MeixcanRugDealer, captioned “Los Angeles Subway Station in Wilshire/Vermont Flooded by Hurricane,” seems to show a cataclysmic nightmare as floodwater pours into Los Angeles’ transportation system. Although it was filmed in Los Angeles, it’s actually footage from “The Tram Ride” at the Universal Studios theme park: a bit of Hollywood special effects, not a real disaster.
This footage of “Great White Shark Swimming Near a Gas Station” also belongs to Universal Studios. So is this footage of a flash flood destroying a small town . However, I have a completely real video of a plane crashing in the middle of a storm. This is not the Water World attraction at Universal Studios.
Dear Ted Cruz: It wasn’t a shark swimming down the 405 freeway.
Posting this photoshopped image of a shark swimming down the highway has been an internet tradition ever since it was first posted in 2011. At the time, it was thought to be a flooded street in Puerto Rico, but this has been linked to the 2015 Texas flood, 2016 Hurricane Matthew, and many others – it’s practically thrown away every time it rains. I wouldn’t think this would fool anyone, but at least one person was: Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who re-posted the image with the phrase “Damn it.”
However, this photo of a shark eating a plane did not, surprisingly, fool Ted Cruz .
During the hurricane, an earthquake did occur.
Given the misinformation that was circulating during the hurricane, you’ll be forgiven for calling “hurricane” bullshit, but there was actually a magnitude 5.0 quake during Storm Hillary.
It wasn’t just a weird coincidence or proof that God tried (and failed) to kill Los Angeles. It was an unusual event, but not unheard of. According to the US Geological Survey :
It is known that very large changes in low pressure associated with large storm systems (typhoons, hurricanes, etc.) cause episodes of shifts (slow earthquakes) in the earth’s crust, and can also play a role in the occurrence of some destructive earthquakes.