

The misty rain collected and tested in the video rolled in from Santa Monica Bay in a turbulent marine layer the morning of March 31. This wasn’t a typical rain. High waves and strong winds in the bay had generated enough sea spray to contribute to a dense cloud bank which rolled in over the western coast of the Los Angeles Basin.

The rain, if it was that, seemed unusual in that it was like the Westside’s famous “June Gloom” only too early for the season and it raindrops small in diameter. This precipitation was also unusual in that it was the most radioactive rain sample EnviroReporter.com has yet detected in Southern California.

A subsequent storm, in the evening had substantially less radiation in it as it had come in on a front versus form over the churning Pacific. The higher altitude rain was colder with larger raindrops suggesting that the two precipitation events, while related, were not comprised from the same water source.

One misty rain sample collected in downtown Santa Monica was over five times normal background radiation, the highest level in Los Angeles Basin rain since this reporter began sampling and testing different media March 15, 2011, four days after the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns began.

Even after conducting over 1,500 radiation tests, it was still shocking to detect rain readings so hot as to qualify for California Highway Patrol hazardous materials protocol. But it wasn’t surprising.

The weather conditions were perfect for radioactive “buckyballs” and other Fukushima fission products in Pacific waters to suffuse the air and moisture and rain down on unsuspecting Southern Californians.

Few of these people know that radiation-impacted sea spray can spread hundreds of miles inland bearing radionuclides like the ones unleashed at Fukushima Japan over a year ago beginning March 11, 2011. Like an unwanted April Fools joke, the cooling sea breeze in Southern California could be carrying contamination borne in ocean waters well in advance of the main sea of cesium, strontium, uranium and plutonium that covers an area the size of California drifting eastward from Japan towards North America. That mass will impact California directly in 2013 heralding The Endless Bummer.

The National Weather Service announced the imperfect storm March 31 a couple of hours after this reporter sampled the Santa Monica marine layer precipitation and found it to be markedly hot. It seemed unusual in that the conditions the NWS described seemed to have arrived long before the warning were given.

It wasn’t unusual that the service doesn’t inform Americans of the radiation in their rain. In fact, as our coverage has shown over the last year, the American government basically considers the triple meltdowns – with seven additional reactors worth of spent fuel rods hanging precariously in a fourth destroyed reactor building – a non-event.

Regardless, the weather conditions seemed perfect to see how accurate EnviroReporter.com‘s investigation had been in determining how buckyballs and Fukushima radiation was impacting Southern California. It turns out that they seem dead on.

The nature of the land where the Santa Monica sprinkle sample was taken indicated no “natural” radon progeny which could give a false reading of high radiation from the meltdowns. Indeed, this marine-layer rain was blowing in straight off the bay negating the possibility of radon gas impact.

What we detected back at Radiation Station was goo. The video evidences how the Inspector Alert nuclear radiation monitor detected heightened ionization very close to the rain sample – less than half an inch. This is indicative of alpha radiation, 60 to 1,000 times worse than beta or gamma radiation. This was goo made airborne in the restive seas and violent gusts and mixing with the ocean rains that lasted for less than an hour.

The weather service said that coastal areas across Southern California could see southwest winds of 25 to 35 miles per hour with gusts up to 50 mph by late afternoon and evening. The wild winds were courtesy of a storm that had swept southward out of the Gulf of Alaska pummeling the West Coast north of us with possibly even hotter sea spray since it is further up-current related to the source of the contamination over 5,000 miles away, Japan.

A day earlier NWS had issued a high surf advisory for San Francisco, southern Monterey Bay and Big Sur. The weather was so bad that a 67-foot yacht, the Clipper Venture 6, was slammed by a massive wave injuring three of the 13 people on board 400 miles off the California coast. A weather service buoy 500 miles off of Eureka in Humboldt County recorded winds over 50 mph in 30 foot seas.

This kind of massive agitation of an ocean creates huge amounts of sea spray which can coalesce into rain. It is possible that across the Pacific, this kind of agitation of contaminated sea water has helped push the radioactive water now turned into rain, farther east than the main current on the prevailing westerly winds. This can be the reason such high radiation readings in sea-sourced rain have been found months before the main gyre of goo arrives.

The increasingly toxic tide hit Ventura Harbor with 14 foot waves while farther out to sea the Channel Islands were pounded by 10 foot swells. Farther south in Santa Monica Bay, where EnviroReporter.com photographed the turbulent toxic sea spray set loose by the churning chop, 8 foot waves crashed ashore in Hermosa Beach.

Further strengthening the scientific mechanism that Fukushima radiation is impacting Southern California via Pacific Ocean sea spray, a brief storm unrelated to the earlier misty rain, swept through the region and was decidedly less radioactive than the earlier sprinkles. The evening rain was just 30% hotter than background radiation, a 15-fold reduction in radionuclides from the precipitation detected by Radiation Station Santa Monica in the morning.

“Beta Watch” delineated the unholy confluence between the U.C. Davis study showing that uranium-60 buckyballs, and possibly other radionuclides unleashed from the three destroyed Japanese reactors, created en masse at Fukushima and spewed into the Pacific making its way ashore in North America on sea spray, a form of radionuclide mobilization confirmed in several United Kingdom and European studies.

The highest radiation in Los Angeles-area rain yet recorded, in the form of precipitation from a fog bank of moisture riven with radioactive sea spray, strongly suggests that Southern California has been and will get pounded by Fukushima’s increasingly deadly cargo.