In a matter of five days, back-to-back atmospheric rivers drenched California in rain, snow, over 100 mph winds, and hail, claiming nine lives and causing approximately $11 billion in damages.
Climate change and “Mother Nature” are blamed, but the hard truth about the extreme weather recently slamming the Golden State is that three out of God’s “Four Great Judgments”—rain, hail, and snow—just visited California. Many have been hoping and praying that the fourth judgment, earthquakes, does not follow.
“The four great judgments that Almighty [God] Allah is bringing upon America are rain, hail, snow and earthquakes. We see them now covering all sides of America, as the Holy Qur’an prophesies, ‘curtailing her on all her sides.’ And these judgments would push the people into the center of the country, and there they would realize that it is Allah (God) Who is bringing them and their country to a naught,”
said the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, quoting his teacher, the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s book, “The Fall of America,” from Chapter 35, “America Surrounded with The Judgment of Allah,” page 154.
The Minister shared those divine words during Part 10 of his 2013, 58-week lecture series “The Time and What Must Be Done.”
At press time, meteorologists predicted a true break in activity through the end of Feb. 15. Much damage has already been done: 475 mudslides, 390 fallen trees, multiple successful water rescues, increased volume in traffic collisions, extinguishment of a dozen structure fires, and 441 potholes in the City of Los Angeles as of Feb. 6, according to L.A. City fire chief Kristin Crowley. The storm also brought a large amount of snow to the Sierra, causing the state’s snowpack to rise by 20 percent to 72 percent of the yearly average, according to CBS News.
On Feb. 4, Governor Gavin Newsom proclaimed a state of emergency for Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties in Southern California. In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass called for a local state of emergency and urged drivers to slow down and evacuate upon orders to avoid rescue attempts, among other things. The Department of Water and Power has since restored power to over 59,000 customers throughout the city, said Chief Crowley.
California is not immune to what has been plaguing the country, which has been warned by the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and borne witness to by the words of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, his National Representative.
On Feb. 5, the second storm placed 1.4 million people in the L.A. area under flash flood warning and it shut off power for more than one million people across the state.
Multi-million homes were threatened with mud, boulders and debris-turned projectiles, and, floodwater caused temporary overloads to sewers that resulted in sewage overflowing onto streets at 10 locations, according to the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. Media reports indicated the spillage also led to the closure of Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro and all open coastlines.
Cars drove through flood waters, leaving motorists stranded in trees or atop their vehicles, and others who hit pockets of water went spinning, landing in solo crashes and or hitting other vehicles, according to news reports.
A stretch of Mulholland Drive in Studio City remained closed on Feb. 8 following a series of mudslides that covered portions of the canyon route and left parts of the roadway in danger of collapsing, according to KNX News. Sixteen people were evacuated in Studio City, near the Hollywood Hills, due to flooding and mudslides. In Bel Air, a landslide near Los Angeles crushed an unoccupied house, ejecting a 100-year-old baby grand piano, reported the Weather Channel.
“To be plagued with too much rain will destroy property and lives. It swells the rivers and creeks. Too much rain floods cities and towns. … Rain makes the atmosphere too heavy with moisture causing sickness. Wind with rain can bring destruction to towns and cities, bringing various germs, causing sickness to the people.
It produces unclean water by the swelling of streams and destroying reservoirs of pure drinking water used for the health of the people. Rain is a destructive army within itself. Hail stones are also a property and life destroyer,” writes the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad in Chapter 36, “Four Great Judgments of America” from “The Fall of America.”
Californians have long braced for the “big one,” in terms of a catastrophic earthquake, anticipated to move mountains, crumble homes and other structures, crack roads, separate earth, and wreak havoc. But water, an atmospheric river even raised the eyebrows of weather experts.
Many people were stunned.
“When you hear that term (atmospheric river), it usually means that there’s going to be a lot of rain headed your way if you’re on the bull’s eye of an atmospheric river,” stated Ryan Kittell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service (NWS).
“Atmospheric river” is a relatively new term to describe a Pacific storm that has a very long moisture fetch (the area in which ocean waves are generated by the wind) and speed, and it tends to produce quite a bit of rain due to a great availability of moisture, explained Mr. Kittell.
It is just “a very wet Pacific storm,” he told The Final Call. Visualize it as a long path of moisture that’s pointed towards the coast, up in the air, the atmosphere, which is why it tends to produce higher rain total storms, because of the moisture, he said.
“That’s probably the power of that term in that most people when they hear that term would at least think, ‘Wow! Probably very wet; a lot of rain.’ … The nuance between the scientific definition of it is probably more complicated than it has to be,” continued Mr. Kittell.
Another difference between an atmospheric and typical storm is the former moves very slowly, explained Mr. Kittell. Also, an atmospheric river is visible because it usually has a lot of clouds associated with it, he continued.
“This one was particularly significant in that it moved so slowly that it was practically stalled over Los Angeles County for two days. It didn’t move, and so it just continuously rained, including on Sunday night (Feb. 4) when it was the heaviest. It just rained a lot in a 12-hour period,” stated Mr. Kittell.
A two-day total of rainfall in this atmospheric river ranked No. 3, three since 1877 for Southern California, according to Mr. Kittell. A three-day total ranked No. 2 all-time, he said.
“It kind of puts into perspective that this storm is something that in the last 150 years that we have data for Downtown L.A., this is the second or third highest rain amount. … It was [a] rare event. There was something more in the past, but it was a rare event and just a lot of water for an urban area to deal with, and we certainly saw impacts,” stated Mr. Kittell.
“We’re just witnessing the beginning, 500 mudslides. Even the urban areas, which normally don’t get hit with certain atrocities, in America’s fall, we’re going to be chastised, too, for not listening to divine guidance, for not recognizing who this man Farrakhan is in our midst,” stated Student Minister Abdul Malik Sayyid Muhammad, Western Region Representative of Minister Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
“We have an awesome responsibility to do the best we can to educate our community on the time and what must be done. We have to make them aware that these are going to increase,” he stated.
That means conducting radio interviews, holding community town hall meetings, and even setting up emergency response, teaching about survival kits and how to survive, he said. “It’s going to get that bad,” continued Student Minister Malik Muhammad. He feels that Allah is prepping the West Coast for bigger atrocities, so those in the Nation of Islam, who have been given the prophecy and know this more than any other people, must get out and sound the alarm, he urged.
“All of this is for us. All of this is for us to come out of her (America), be not partakers of her sins, but God’s got to spank America a little bit, because we think she’s going to last forever,” he added.
Approximately two dozen cars suffered flat tires due to massive potholes on back-to-back days of flooding, reported KNX 1070 News. It also reported that when the storm began, a “Honda Civic-sized” block and other debris had fallen onto LaBrea Avenue in the Baldwin Hills area, not far from Obama Blvd. (named after former President Barack Obama), forcing the shutdown of lanes.
Also in Baldwin Hills, not far from the historic Leimert Park in the Crenshaw District, the hill behind a home on Don Diablo Drive came crashing down, saturating nearly every room of a home with about four feet of mud, displacing the family, according to KTLA news.
Anissa Muhammad, the Western Region Student Coordinator for the Nation of Islam’s Ministry of Health and a disaster preparedness expert, lives nearby where that happened. Her family lives below two tiers of homes on a hill, she said.
“You can see where the rain has saturated the hillside, and there are large clumps of dirt that has moved down the hillside,” she told The Final Call. On Feb. 6, city workers had to respond with bulldozers, because mud poured down the hill, along with a tree, and blocked some tenants in and out, she said.
From her view of their backyards or homes, she continued, the foundations of some of those homes are not secure. “I’m looking at dry rotted wood, water washing away from the metal beams that are supposed to be the foundation,” stated Ms. Muhammad.
“We have to stay prepared. We have to be prepared, because out here in L.A., with the ground being so saturated with water, imagine what would happen if we got a 6.0 earthquake?” she added.
