Do hurricanes, tornadoes, even earthquakes hit in California?

One comment

1. 

   Austin on March 2, 2010 at 7:00 am

   California has absolutely no hurricanes. I don’t believe a hurricane of any level has ever reached there in recorded meteorological history. There is, although, sometimes a bit of rain from the remains of a hurricane that died out, but even that is rare, and only happens about once every year or so. You can get more rain depending on where you live. If you live in San Diego or San Diego county, you should get very little rain. This area probably has the most stable weather in the whole state. But if you lived in the Santa Barbara area, you will get extremely powerful winds for a period of time about once a year, called Chinook (pronounced like shin and look) winds. Those blow in from the mountains and such, but really aren’t powerful enough to be dangerous. It also rains more heavily in the Las Angeles area, but nothing really problematic. I’ve once heard that there were waterspouts quite a ways offshore in the LA-Santa Barbara area, but I don’t think they were tornadic, meaning they weren’t much of a threat. I’ve only ever heard of weak tornados in the desert, ones that don’t seem to be too damaging, like Fujita 1 or 0, but even those are extremely rare. The earthquakes are very rarely ever dangerous. There have been few where people actually died, although there were two really bad ones in San Francisco before, one in the 1980′s and the other in something like the 1920′s or 40′s. Overall if you’re really that concerned, the best place to live would be San Diego or North San Diego County, like in Escondido, San Marcos, or Oceanside. Also, its probably worth mentioning that I think there is an El Nino right now, so California is experiencing more rain than usual, but that’s probably good, because another shouldn’t come for quite a while, and as you said, you’re moving in only a few years.