It’s just a normal winter day, with a reminder that the weather is humbling.

Sara Rubin here, writing from a warm and dry perch inside the Weekly’s headquarters in Seaside. I’m lucky that today for me involved very little travel—last night, driving through North County on Highway 101, I hit some super-sized puddles for quite the splash. Luckily my passengers and I were fine, but it’s a reminder that it’s wet out there, and with these heavy rains come hazards. 

Driving is one of the biggest hazards, says Monterey County Public Works Director Randell Ishii. “When we have high-intensity rainfall we encourage motorists to use caution on the road, give themselves more space between the driver in front of themselves and use good judgment,” he says. “We see people driving too fast for the conditions and unfortunately that could lead to accidents. That’s why we place signage, to let motorists know of conditions on the roads.”

In a storm that is mostly delivering rain rather than wind, water becomes the biggest concern. (Along with more rain there is wind in the forecast for tonight, so the Public Works Department is staying tuned for possible downed trees. Ishii encourages you to report what you see by calling (831) 755-4925, or 911 after hours.) 

County officials update their website with road closures right away, but map apps like Waze and Google Maps rely on user input and might be a little slower to reflect reality on the road. There’s the usual advice to avoid travel during weather events if you can, and if you can’t, be prepared—check the county road closure website and as of this writing, you’ll see six county roads closed due to flooding. (That includes Rogge Road and Paul Avenue in Bolsa Knolls, a notoriously flood-prone neighborhood north of Salinas.) 

In Big Sur, Highway 1 is closed—again—due to a slide, this time cutting off access roughly between the Esalen Institute and Lucia on the South Coast. (That’s a state highway, but Old Coast Road, a county-maintained dirt road, is also closed due to a slide.) Laureles Grade in Carmel Valley remains open to traffic (at the moment) with one lane closed due to mudslides.

With the Pajaro River rising—from 3.4 feet yesterday to 7.9 feet as of 2:30pm today—county officials are also closing Murphy Road in North County. Most calls coming in have been reports of localized flooding on low-lying roads, and some road closures come from anticipated flooding. 

As the general public and responding government agencies scramble to be prepared and to keep up, I am again reminded that the weather is humbling. Big precipitation or wind events come regardless of whether or not we’ve built communities and roads and bridges—that humans and our infrastructure are in the path of a storm is purely incidental to the storm. 

Meteorologists at the National Weather Service are careful not to distinguish between “good” weather and “bad” weather, but simply to report judgment-free about the “weather.” It starts to matter to us when we are interacting with it, and then the takeaway is almost always the same: Be prepared, because we have no control over the weather, but we can control how ready we are for its impacts.