Californians think about the big one it's typically an earthquake but meteorologists are now debating another extreme weather event that could hit the Golden State an ark storm or atmospheric River 1,000-year storm that could dump as much as 100 in of rain on some parts of the state displacing Millions with more we are joined by seismologist Dr Lucy Jones she was the chief scientist of the USGS multihazard project that's the group behind The Arc storm scenario there's even a video that was produ
ced uh to show this Arc storm and its impact this video I watched it uh it's all based off of the great flood of 1862 good to see you Dr Lucy what is this AR storm scenario about and what's the possibility of it actually happening something like the arkstorm will happen at some point uh just like the earthquakes inevitable you know the variation in in rain is inevitable the difference is is that you know there are beneficial rainstorms we don't really have beneficial earthquakes but when the rai
n gets too intense there's a lot of damage and when we modeled what would happen in a really big flood the type of one that happens every few hundred years and compared to what happens in the big earthquake that's once every few hundred years we actually saw more damage from the storm than we did from the earthquake because uh you know we used to have sto floods all the time California and we built our levies and we built our debris basins and dams and controlled it got rid of the smaller ones b
ut if we exceed the capacity or perhaps I should say when we exceed the capacity of our current flood control because that can always happen at any point we will start seeing large parts of the state flooded and in fact in this model which was actually a little bit less than the 1862 storm we saw 24% of the properties of California being uh damaged by flood water it's okay that brings me to when I'm watching this it's pretty terrifying to see this video that was produced this was produced by the
way in in 2022 so it's more than a year old no oh go no it's like 2011 oh 20 okay 2011 so right it's a decade old but it's making the rounds right now on social media it's getting a lot of attention I mean we heard Jonathan by next week downtown Los Angeles could have 9 in so how realistic is this actually happening go ahead go ahead all right so so what makes a really bad storm is it doesn't stop to get to the level that's that level of damage and what happened in 1862 was that the rain doesn'
t stop in 1862 we had 45 consecutive days of rain and what we're seeing this week is uh not considered beneficial rain it's enough rain to be potentially damaging but it's only going on for 5 days or something like this right and it would really need to be going on for weeks to get to the level of dam Dage that's comparable to a big earthquake okay so then I saw another video that says there's a 30% chance of this Arc storm happening in the next 30 Years is that true that implies a 1% Pere chanc
e that's probably um a little high uh when we look in the historic record I me how do you tell right we don't have people but we can use geology and look at times when we've seen really big flood deposits offshore and we see the arkstorm level of storms every every um two 300 years is the sort of average time um so uh the one you know 30% chance in 30 years that's too high that's an earthquake sort of number okay so okay well that puts me at ease and then I think really you know to prepare for t
his and I think this is sort of the point of the video that was created by USGS is to hello we need to prepare for this officials who have the ability to you know do the levies and the flood control there's there's two messages one is to the state yes we you know fixing up levies isn't uh a useless Prospect it really is quite important very few of our levies are built to the level that they really should be to protect protect people there's also though it's a recognition that we are afraid of ea
rthquakes much more than we are of floods and it's trying to help people to see that you know it isn't just rain it can be very damaging and therefore take precautions don't think doesn't matter I'll just go drive where I was going to drive when we're getting really heavy rainfall like this take it seriously yeah that's uh turn around don't drown that's what meteorologists say all the time okay well uh Dr Lucy Jones always appreciate you thank you so much thanks for having me
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