Photo submitted by Long Beach Post reader Anna Martinez

By all means, call me a nerd, but I find the battle between nature and suburban sprawl absolutely fascinating. It’s what I love and hate most about Los Angeles – the idea that folks want to live near nature, but at the same time, bubble themselves from the inconveniences that come with it.

The easy way to accomplish this is to live where you please and just expect that nothing bad will happen when nature comes knocking.  In an area as geologically volatile as Los Angeles, this is purely comical. We are no more in control of nature than we are the moon and stars, and it becomes apparent when massive rain storms and their ensuing floods destroy the communities we’ve created.

At right: Sé Reed, former Long Beach Post contributor and co-founder of {open} bookstore in Long Beach took this photo of a fallen tree in Recreation Park yesterday.

Long Beach lucked out this week. After nearly seven consecutive days of heavy rain – and warnings of tornadoes and flash floods yesterday – the city is, at worst, reporting light street flooding and a few power outages. For a city that sits well below sea-level in some parts, that is not all bad. It certainly wasn’t as bad as last year, when storm drains were overwhelmed by storms not as lengthy but more intense than the ones we experienced this week. Despite a few mishaps, the infrastructure held up pretty well. Areas like Laguna Beach didn’t fare so favorably.

The San Gabriel Mountain range sits directly to our north, above the strikingly flat landscape of Los Angeles and Orange County where homes have pressed further and further against the slopes in herds. The incomparable author John McPhee described the situation thusly in his definitive essay Los Angeles Against The Mountains:

The San Gabriels, in their state of tectonic youth, are rising as rapidly as any range on earth. Their loose inimical slopes flout the tolerance of the angle of repose. Rising straight up out of the megalopolis, they stand ten thousand feet above the nearby sea, and they are not kidding with this city.”

He goes on to explain in great detail the peril that belies downstream communities, and it makes me count my lucky stars that Long Beach is so near to the coast. Communities at the foot of the mountains like Pasadena and La Canada are in much greater danger.

But this also causes Long Beach to face facts. As the mouthpiece for all of Los Angeles to empty into the Pacific Ocean, both the L.A. and San Gabriel rivers rage through Long Beach during storms and empty into the open sea, carrying with them enormous amounts of trash and debris that range in the hundreds of million tons. We know the effect that this has on our beaches, thanks to consecutive years of poor water quality rankings, but it also makes you wonder about the possibilities of what could happen in the event that a once-in-a-lifetime rain occurs if the storm drains are overwhelmed as they were in January this year.

They held up this time, but the city was not without its troubles, as you see in the videos and photos here. Trees collapsed in Recreation Park. Portions of the intersection at Redondo and Anaheim were closed due to major flooding. Cars parked along Ocean Boulevard were towed out due to rising waters. Long Beach Boulevard turned into a small river. As the video posted below points out, it doesn’t seem like much changed in the way of planning between last January and now.

But after receiving nearly a year’s-worth of rain in the past seven days, I am proud of the Long Beach drain systems and their handling of severe flooding that caused significant damage elsewhere. But I’m also aware that it wasn’t long ago that the system was overwhelmed and that in the grand scheme of the history of the earth and the basin we live in, this past week amounted to little more than a dripping faucet.

From photographer and video producer Adreana Langston: Flooding off the 6th Street exit of the 710 Freeway South in Downtown Long Beach on Wednesday December 22, 2010. The drainage system on the 6th Street exit of the 710 freeway South is not equip to handle the type of storms the area has been experiencing in the last year. Of course, since the city is broke, there will be no upgrades forthcoming. But you’d think, in anticipation of this storm, that the city or CAL Trans would have blocked the 6th Street exit because as you’ll see in still photos at the end of this video, the EXACT SAME THING happened in January 2010.

The following shots were submitted by Long Beach Post reader Craig Wallace. May not be safe, but it sure looks like fun.