Well that assumes that large scale nuclear blasts are still possible...

Why should it be impossible? A lot of different (and sometimes unstable) groups/corps/governments/dragons have access to nukes. Woudln't make me feel to comfortable about it.

It's happened before.

Los Angeles is essentially a desert, and like most deserts it is subject ot Flash Floods. Los Angeles also has an extremely short rainy season, getting just 30 cm of rain each year. Historically, the LA basin has filled up with water quickly and drained quickly because, as you say, it has all those canals. But when water comes down in Southern California, it ends up in LA very quickly because the compacted desert soil has very little absorbance (and the paved regions have even less).

If a shift in weather systems left LA with getting an amount of water from the sky that one normally associates with Seattle (which is extremely possible, 300 cm is not out of the question for a single year), the Los Angeles Basin would turn into a lake. A lake with mountains sticking out of it, but a lake nonetheless.

With the current infrastructure, that would also drain out fairly well. But if the canals were overwhelmed and clogged with debris (even debris carried by the rising flood waters), the drainage might take months. And if the rainfall was repeated the next year, drainage might last all the way into the next rainy season - causing the whole situation to achieve a semi-permanent status.

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Remember, by 2070, noone has been maintaining the LACDA Project (Los Angeles Country Drainage Area) for nearly 60 years. Which means that it probably doesn't work any more. People have by this point built buildings in and around the canals, so when the flood waters rise, there is lots of material to make debris dams out of to keep the flood waters in.

LA Country is considered susceptible to three main natural disasters:

Earthquakes (which LA is very prepared against)
Flood (which LA is currently somewhat prepared against)
Fire (which LA is moderately prepared against currently)

The problem with the Flood and Fire protection is that these are collective protections. Once everything gets privatized in the Shadowrun future dystopia, those don't exist anymore. Earthquake protection, on the other hand, is an indivdual protection for each and every building - so it's still there after everything is owned by corporations.

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And yes, raging firestorms could also destroy LA. But then it wouldn't be covered in poisonous water and governmental indifference with all the juicy parallels to New Orleans.

-Frank

Heh, good points all. I guess I never really thought about LA as being a flood danger, but you're very right about the compact sandy soil not being very absorbant.

Hmm... in fact, why not combine the two disasters? Fire comes first, leaving scorched earth, while the subsequent rains (and mudslides) drown everything over the next year or two?

Yes, but the reasoning given was absolute crazy talk. It's like when Dragonball destroyed the moon to stem the tide of werewolves. Sure, LA can flood severely, that's not even difficult. But it isn't going to happen because earthquakes upend the pacific ocean into the central valley. That would destroy a majority of life on Earth. And no, I'm not exagerating. The dinosaurs were killed by a comet impact that created the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan, the crater that the SR4 book is drawing is several times larger than that, which means that it would devastate the majority of the world.

Rainfall causes floods = plausible.
Earthquakes cause floods = crazytalk.

-Frank

If a comet impact killed the dinosaurs (There isn't enough evidence to be sure and there are many conflicting theories), it was because of dust kick up into the atmosphere, not the impact itself. Having the sun blacked out does tend to damage the food supply. While I am no expert on Earthquakes, they don't tend to eject debries into the upper atmosphere.

Of course, Earthquakes do cause flooding. If you have any doubt ask the victims of the recent Tsunami.

And Picolo didn't destroy the moon to stem the tide of werewolves. That would be crazy. He destroyed the moon to prevent one kid from turning into a were-monkey.

That was from 8 KM of earth. The Area they are showing in the book would be (Maybe tens of)thousands of times bigger.

Thank you mfb, I was listening to that song when I read this.

good times, good times

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't California provide a very large chunk of Japan's fruits and vegetables? Also, being (currently) the 5th largest economy in the world, how does Cali being constantly FUBAR-ed (most correct use of that ever) change the not only the world economy, but also a large chunk of the food source? Is this where aquafarms and soy come in?

Like we said: most of what happenned to Cal throughout most of SR's future history makes zero sense. Losing California would have a worse economic impact on the UCAS than all the other little nation-states that declared their independence in the books ever could, but according to the books the state was simply jettisoned as if it were useless and not one of the largest economies on the planet.

Anyway, the main objection people have with Los Angeles and the Central Valley flooding--either one of them, really--is that either sinking from their current elevation into the sea as described would cause a tsunami the likes of which cannot be imagined. Tir Tairngire would be completely demolished--which alone might make the whole thing worth it --and so would Seattle, Hawaii, Aztalan, and probably most of Japan, the lower parts of China, all those little southeast asian nations like Taiwan and Cambodia, etc. Something like that would be essentially global in scale; the only place stable enough to do a run in a mere year after that would maybe be Europe.

and then they go and do it!

Looks like it's all my fault.