SAN DIEGO — Damage from Tropical Storm Hilary is minor across most of San Diego County but are there potential dangers yet to be revealed in the days to come?
Dr. Pat Abbott is a professor of geology emeritus at San Diego State University. He considered the question.
"Well, we were very, very lucky with Tropical Storm Hilary; instead of coming with the force we expected; luckily the storm made landfall over 200 miles down in Baja, California; it lost a lot of energy coming up across the border and it traveled across the county remarkably fast," Abbott said.
He says if the storm had stalled here or moved more slowly, we could have seen five times the amount of rain that we had.
“We’re seeing glimpses of the future. We’ve been hearing about global heating for years and years and here it begins. Tropical storms two years in a row, the oceans are heating. We talk about heat waves over Phoenix in the air but we're having marine heat waves also. Where do storms get their energy? The energy of the sun stored in the water," Abbott said.
And he expects more hurricanes and tropical storms to develop in the years to come because of it.
“Two years in a row of rain will mean far more cliff collapses, more landslides, more of those kinds of damages that are triggered by excess water in the earth. We got off very, very easy. The main thing we had with Hilary was a glimpse of the future and also a test of our emergency response system and I would say we passed with a grade of A," Abbott said.
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