SAN DIEGO (KGTV) – San Diego County saw plenty of rain this weekend from the coast to the mountains. But all that rainfall didn’t pack as big of a punch when it comes to flooding and other weather-related impacts.
"What we had was a nice, gentle fall over many, many hours, kind of an agricultural kind of rain,” Dr. Pat Abbott, a geologist at San Diego State University, said. "Those kinds don't really usually cause any problems. If the rain had to come down in torrents, it would have washed off a lot of the soil on these burnt slopes like this, and it would have been messy and a lot of messy rain flows coming out on the road.”
ABC 10News spoke with some people in Lakeside last Friday who had some worries about the wet weather after a major fire that burned in September, with those burn scars.
Abbott explained how another area with visible burn scars – the site of last October’s Fairmont Fire - about why we didn’t see the rain cause problems with these burn scars.
“Where we're standing right here near Fairmount and Montezuma, and these areas of Burns, these happen to be very hard, firm rocks. So basically, all that's going to happen here is wash off the surface soil. The upper 6 inches or 12 inches can wash down, but you're not going to get a massive house-destroying landslide,” Abbott said.
Abbott told ABC 10News San Diego may have dodged the proverbial bullet with it raining buckets this weekend. But with more rain on the horizon, the ground is already saturated.
“You can think back over recent years, where we had ultra rainy years, how many beach cliff collapses we had, and landslides we had. We're not going to have that yet,” Abbott said. “But if we get the 2nd set of storms, the 3rd set, as we add more and more water into the earth, that sets the scene for more slope instabilities.”
