I once lived in an apartment in Los Angeles that flooded every time it rained. Not just a polite drip, either. The ceiling sagged and dripped into long wet ribbons, and the wall beside my desk would bleed water like I was playing out Barton Fink in color. I wonder how that space looks now, as Southern California comes out of a long rain event where the hills above Altadena saw nearly nine inches at the site of January’s Eaton fire, between November 14 and November 21. People love to talk about tanned and toned Dallas Raines, the veteran KABC meteorologist who can summon high drama from a passing low-pressure system. Or the obligatory SUV hydroplaning down the 5 Freeway. In L.A., weather banter is its own civic dialect.

We rarely admit how fragile the physical city really is, and how the very places that frame our daily lives—the courtyard where you catch the first blue of morning, the balcony where you watch the hills smolder at golden hour—can start to fail the moment the skies decide to turn. Everything here is built for one type of weather. And most of the time it works. But when it doesn’t, it really doesn’t work.

L.A. has spent over a century advertising its perfect Mediterranean climate. Now increasingly frequent severe weather events are triggering citywide soul-searching about who deserves protection, what neighborhoods get resources, which elected officials are to blame, and whether the promise of this place still holds. Some parts of L.A. County picked up close to a foot of rain in 10 days in February 2023, leaving more than 80,000 Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers without power, while unhoused residents faced flooded encampments, freezing nights, and packed shelters. Almost exactly a year later, emergency crews

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