Angelika California is used to distress when it comes to natural disasters. Wildfires, earthquakes, and droughts are usually on the agenda. It's a state that not only counts among the most populous, but also has a lot to offer geographically. From the ocean to the high mountains, desert, and rich agricultural land, there is something for everyone. The sparse rainfall in recent years has caused concern, as extreme droughts lead to constant forest fires, not only during the California fire season, usually in September and October. Everyone was longing for rain and this year it came in abundance. This, however, led to catastrophic conditions again, namely to massive floods, landslides, fallen trees, power outages and evacuations.

In California, it seems like everything always plays out to extremes. It was unusually cold in the winter, as Michael mentioned previously in his story on Shelter Cove, and it snowed not only in the mountains but also in lower areas. Since the average California driver is already overwhelmed by normal rainfalls, chaos broke out during the winter storms. People in the Bay Area were almost begged not to drive to the ski resorts at Lake Tahoe, which is normally a popular weekend destination, as the snow masses there led to road closures.

Some people who thought they were clever blindly followed apps like Google Maps or Waze to get around these closures, but they quickly learned that neither Google nor Waze knew which roads were cleared from snow and which weren't. The storms went on for months, one storm after another since December. Many smaller coastal roads simply broke away, and in Santa Cruz, the cheerful surfer and student city, 50 miles south of San Francisco, people were kayaking in the flooded streets. In the Los Angeles area, up in the mountains around San Bernardino, some people were snowed in for weeks.

Here in San Francisco, the strong wind that came with the rain was particularly troublesome for us. Countless trees fell because their roots could no longer find a hold in the muddy ground and the wind blew some of the huge trees away like matches. Even the huge tree in front of our house gave up and just fell across 24th Street on New Year's Eve. It crushed a parked car that belonged to the waitress in the restaurant next door. Thank God nothing worse happened and nobody was injured. Normally there is always a lot of activity on the sidewalk in front of our house, but since it was raining and New Year's Eve, the flow of pedestrians was limited. And typical for San Francisco, neighbors put up a Gofundme Page to buy the waitress a new car.

In other news, some of the windows of the skyscrapers in downtown San Francisco broke, and the pieces flew down from dizzying heights, which was naturally quite dangerous. But miraculously, no one was hit, which is probably also due to the fact that the city center of San Francisco has been deserted for years. One then wonders how it can be that skyscrapers have such flimsy windows that they shatter in a storm. The windows did not only break in older skyscrapers but also in relatively new structures like the Salesforce building. But I had learned many years ago in my earthquake training with the firefighters that skyscrapers only have safety glass from a certain floor. For this reason, first responders advise to seek protection at the entrances of skyscrapers in case of an earthquake, in order to not get hit by flying debris. Skyscrapers themselves are allegedly built particularly earthquake-proof. Whether one can rely on that, however, I now have my doubts.

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• More topics you might be interested in:

  	Lost Coast for the Third Time
  	Superbloom
  	Top Product: Selfie Mirror for the System Camera
  	Corona finally caught up with us
  	Declaration of goods upon entry
  	California, the Nanny State