Several years ago I began to notice that many TV ads for cars featured
swooping shots of speeding cars on mountain or desert roads, many with
wet pavement. As time went along, I became fixated on the ads showing
cars in desert scenes roaring over wet pavement.
Movies also seem prone to wet scenes in Los Angeles. LA Confidential and Training Day quickly come to mind as featuring a large number of wet days and nights and puddles in back alleys.
How did they get this wet pavement? The arid and semiarid regions of
the American southwest don’t have more than a handful of wet days
in a year. In fact, deserts, typically have 10 or fewer inches of rain
per year. Semiarid fall in the 10 to 15 inches per year. Here are a
few cities and their average annual rainfall.
|
Average Annual Rain Fall (inches) |
|
|
Miami |
60 |
|
Atlanta |
48 |
|
Boston |
43 |
|
New York City |
40 |
|
Washington, DC |
39 |
|
Chicago |
34 |
|
Jerusalem |
19 |
|
Sacramento |
17 |
|
Salt Lake City |
15 |
|
Los Angeles |
14 |
|
San Diego |
10 |
|
Phoenix |
7 |
|
Mojave Desert |
4 |
|
Las Vegas |
4 |
|
Cairo |
1 |
More recently I have been noticing that TV and movie images of Los Angeles
in particular are prone to wet pavement. Take the current Denzel Washington
vehicle, Training Day, or the earlier LA Confidential
as examples. Who are they kidding. We all know that LA is in a desert.
Where does all this wet pavement come from? Are the filmmakers rubbing
our noses in the history of all the Federal money that went into water
projects?
11/20/01