Mysterious Island: The Freak Storm of 2006

The recent tornado devastation in Oklahoma brings to mind the fact that wild weather isn’t necessarily just found in the Midwest.  While certainly never rising to the level of destruction seen in Oklahoma, Catalina Island has seen its share of such drama in the form of winter storms, our infamous Nor’easters and, yes, even a tornado or two.

But fear not, esteemed summer visitor, for most of our meteorological conflagrations occur in the winter months.

The recent tornado devastation in Oklahoma brings to mind the fact that wild weather isn’t necessarily just found in the Midwest.  While certainly never rising to the level of destruction seen in Oklahoma, Catalina Island has seen its share of such drama in the form of winter storms, our infamous Nor’easters and, yes, even a tornado or two.

But fear not, esteemed summer visitor, for most of our meteorological conflagrations occur in the winter months.

There was one notable exception to this rule, however, and that was an extraordinarily bizarre, almost mythic episode we had here several years ago.

It came out of a happy summer day in July of 2006, seemingly out of nowhere, and it vanished as quickly as it came.

Before it was over it had left in its wake a wildfire that scorched 1,100 acres of grassland, power outages and a modicum of destruction to local boats and docks—not to mention thousands of startled Islanders and summertime visitors.

I’ve experienced in my life spectacular meteorological events from upstate New York to the Bolivian Amazon to the high seas of the North Atlantic to the Slave Coast of West Africa.  But I’ve never experienced a more sudden, violent and downright bizarre electrical storm than the one we had here on Catalina on the afternoon of July 22, 2006.

I was managing a local hotel at the time and was running around doing six different things, as hotel managers are wont to do.  The first thing I noticed was all of my guests lining the railing on the hotel’s upper floor, mesmerized at something in the distance.

I looked toward the hills on the west side of Avalon Canyon where their collective gazes were fixed and saw the hideously beautiful orange and purple glow of the approaching storm, marbled by bolts of scarlet lightning.

As the storm scudded along the summit west of Avalon, a sudden downpour commenced.  In the midst of this meteorological maelstrom, a terrifying sight appeared directly above town:  a rare horizontal tornado (fortunately rare, fortunately horizontal), began rolling and roiling in on itself, writhing in the midst of the clouds.

The next event was only slightly less stunning.  As I was running around the hotel shutting windows, the rain let up and a blast of extremely hot wind descended upon the Island as if a colossal Revlon hair dryer from hell had been turned on.  This wind was reported by people not only in Avalon, but Island-wide.

As spectacular as the storm was, it was mysteriously a very localized one.  While some residue lightning eventually spread to the mainland, the bulk of the storm’s wrath was visited mainly upon Catalina. The U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency has several buoys stationed in the waters around Catalina and a review of the data turned in by their sensors (wave heights, temperatures, wind direction and velocity, for example) turned up only slight bumps in activity during the storm’s three-hour rampage. The July 28 issue of the Catalina Islander tells the story, allotting no less than three articles and a half dozen color photographs to the event.  Dennis Kaiser wrote mainly of the ensuing fire, but added, “The sudden arrival of the storm … caught many on the Island unaware and it was said to have a surreal, somewhat apocalyptic quality to it.”

Guest columnist Sean Beck, who had been visiting Two Harbors at the time of the storm, summed it up with the closing paragraph of his column:  “This one, I will keep in my memories as the weirdest Catalina trip ever.” Amen.

Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” available on Amazon, Kindle and in stores all over Avalon.