Megastorms, California, and You

R. W. Kerrigan is a California native, with family roots here going back to 1850. He had public safety responsibilities in several California State Parks for 8 years, followed by a B.A. and M.A. (in Biology) from SFSU and a Ph.D. in fungal genetics from U.C. Santa Barbara, then a postdoc at U. Toronto, part of a span of 45 years as a researcher and educator in the life sciences. If you buy brown button or portabella mushrooms in the grocery store, there’s a very good chance they were developed by his research team over many years at a commercial spawn lab in Pennsylvania. His 2016 book from the New York Botanical Garden, Agaricus of North America, weighs 7 pounds and works well as a doorstop in normal weather. He’s responsible for a small pile of patents and research papers.

Rick has loved the outdoors since he was a notorious escape artist in pre-school, exploring the adjacent forest and then, once recaptured, being made to sit at the ‘bad table’ and eat tomato soup. He grew up a frisbee-throw away from the 12,000 acre belt of regional parks at the Alameda - Contra Costa line, and spent those years in those woods, hiking, biking, building forts, and stealth-camping. Early exposure to natural history, encouraged by both parents, led to floristic projects on native plants and unnamed mushrooms in Santa Cruz County (he has since formally given scientific names to more than two dozen ‘new’ species). He loves hiking and packing (at 17, the Rae Lakes loop via Glen Pass) but has done too little of either: has hiked tiny sections of the PCT and once stepped across (not along) the Appalachian Trail. He fully enjoyed the wonderful rail-trail network in Western PA, including a memorable 6-day, 200-mile bike ride along the fabulous Great Allegheny Passage. He once kayaked backwards over a 10-foot Appalachian waterfall (involuntary and not recommended). He is now the keeper of some pleasant land at 2700’ in Calaveras County.

Personal experience of recent severe weather events in the Sierra Foothills, and their consequences, led to a deep dive into what history and science tell us about extreme storms and floods in the West. Public safety remains a major focus of his interests; he chairs the local Emergency Preparedness Committee. His book, Megastorms, California, and You, published by Dryas Press, is intended to be an accessible introduction, with considerable depth, to what is known about extreme West Coast winter weather events and their impacts. With a dash of ‘dry wit for wet times,’ he hopes to inspire and motivate the broad masses and their public officials to become aware and forward-looking, and to take all reasonable measures to reduce expected consequences to the absolute minimum. As he wrote these words on 9/27/24, much of the Southeastern USA was flooded and inaccessible.