City Lights:

There was a moment last week when I wasn’t sure I would live to write this column.

That happened about 1 p.m. Jan. 19, as a tornado began pounding Huntington Beach while I was on my way to an interview at the Central Library. The rain wasn’t much more than a sprinkle when I left the newsroom, so I didn’t think much of driving out into it. I opted to take surface streets instead of the slick freeway, and that was that.

Somewhere on Talbert Avenue, that sprinkle turned into possibly the heaviest downpour I have ever seen. I say “somewhere” because, with the rain hammering down in impenetrable white sheets, I couldn’t even read the signs at the intersections. The white lines on the road vanished and the center divider went with them. I relied on the brake lights of the car in front of me to know I was going in the right direction.

It was the closest I had ever come to driving blindfolded. At one point, though, I glimpsed a driveway on the right, crawled over slowly and found to my relief that it led to a parking lot. I called my interview subjects and told them that I had to stop until the rain died down.

Later that day, I found out how lucky I had been; according to news reports, the wind knocked over an SUV elsewhere in Huntington Beach.

Many people have told me over the years that they love living by the beach because it reminds them how small they are in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes, though, other events prove that notion in a less pleasant way.

I don’t believe in all things being interconnected, but it seemed fitting, in an odd way, that Orange County got pounded by the storm just days after an earthquake leveled much of Haiti and send charities scrambling worldwide.

When a natural disaster hits elsewhere in the world — Haiti, Indonesia, even New Orleans — it’s easy to think that tragedies of that kind only happen “out there.” And maybe they do. We get hit with earthquakes, storms and the like in Southern California, but nothing compared to what other parts of the world suffer. Here, “flooding” means water rising a few inches above the curb at Warner Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway, not a tidal wave leaving thousands widowed and orphaned.

Even when wildfires evacuate neighborhoods throughout the Southland, we have enough emergency responders and first aid to take care of our immediate needs. We don’t need the United Nations to run in and save us or children in other countries to fork over their allowance.

The closest I ever came to personally experiencing a natural disaster was in 2004, when I lived in Connecticut during New England’s worst blizzard in years. The local authorities urged everyone to stock up on food and water, and prepare to stay inside for days. The snow hit soon after, forming white walls several feet high around buildings and turning most of the town where I lived into a ghost town.

For the next two or three days, my roommate and I stayed in, ate the food we had stored and waited for the ice to melt. It was an inconvenience, but because we lived in comfortable Connecticut, that’s all it was. A snowstorm in other parts of the world can be far more deadly.

Still, that moment in the car last week showed how tenuous our efforts can be in the face of nature, even in the First World. When the rain finally cleared, I made it to my interview and found, not surprisingly, that my subjects had been delayed by the weather, too. We can’t stop the rain, but we can take solace in shelter together.

City Editor MICHAEL MILLER can be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at michael.miller@latimes.com .