SPECIAL REPORT: KION covers years of natural disasters on the Central Coast

The past 50 years we’ve covered everything from crime to agriculture, but sometimes it’s Mother Nature herself who throws the biggest curve balls.

Life’s pretty easy here on the Central Coast, but all of that can change in a minute, with natural disasters like fires, floods and earthquakes seemingly becoming a regular part of life here in California.

For those who have lived through these disasters, it creates memories which are hard to erase.

“She’s got her claws in the carpet. I physically dragged her outside.” say Lex and Kelly 20 years after the Loma Prieta Earthquake, “It was just 20 seconds.. it did not stop. it kept shaking.”

John Hibble is curator of the Aptos History Museum. He remembers 1989—-and the massive Loma Prieta quake—seemed to be the longest fraction of a minute, he’s ever experienced.

He said, “And then it was just like the freight train ran straight into the building, because the building just snapped!”

The 6.9 magnitude quake’s epicenter was in Aptos, and the disaster wasn’t just costly in dollars, but lives. At least 63 people were killed.

With each shake, and every quake, scientists are learning more and more about protecting our houses, our loved ones, and are developing an early warning system.

But right now, we’re not getting as many earthquakes as scientists have predicted.

“It’s just surprising that they are as delayed as they are,” says Thorne Lay at UC Santa Cruz, “what they raises is the possibility that when they happen. There will be groups of earthquakes, or swarms of earthquakes, which could be particular difficult to cope with if they are damaging.”

Earthquakes aren’t exactly weather related, but it is something meteorologists keep our eye on. With that said, we do spend most of our time tracking the weather and finding what impacts future storms can hold.

Part of forecasting how storms will impact us in the future is learning about how storms like this have impacted us in the past.

Lilian Longacre recalls Monterey County flooding in 1995, “we’ve lost everything. Everything. This is all our furniture and you can see the mud on it. And stuff. There’s not much we can save.”

The flooding of 1995 caused millions of dollars in damage in Monterey County and forced thousands of evacuations.

Higashi, another Monterey County resident at the time, said, “68 was closed. We tried to come around Del Rey Oaks, and that was closed. There was no way into Salinas.”

But it’s not just heavy rain and flooding that has hurt Central Coast communities.

“I don’t know that I’ll be able to live in Big Sur ever again, but it was beautiful,” said Jessica Cooper after the Soberanes Fire in 2016.

The Soberanes Fire of was the most expensive fire to fight in the U.S. at the time, costing 260 million dollars to put out, but that’s not the only one of the fires we’ve battled here on the Central Coast. Flashback to 1987 to Pebble Beach…

That fire burned 36 homes as it swept through.

Jonathan Pangburn, an Information Officer at CalFire, says, “It was more devastating than it otherwise could have been.”

Officer Pangburn says with today’s communication and infrastructure, the Pebble Beach Fire wouldn’t have caused near as much damage. While firefighters have learned a lot since then, it seems like the fire danger is only getting worse here and elsewhere in the state. Just this past year, the Camp became the state’s most destructive on record.

“The fires continue to increase in size, and impact on communities,” said Officer Pangburn.

While it seems like the weather is only getting stronger, so too is the power to forecast it.

Whatever Mother Nature throws at us, you can count on the KION Weather Authority to get your through it.