Very few people likely remember when “The Big One” struck the Los Angeles area. Not an earthquake, but a storm against which all others are measured.

In the first week of March, 1938, an already wet winter was capped off by a deluge previously unseen in the area.

More than 11 inches of rain in downtown Los Angeles (and more than 30 inches at Lake Arrowhead) washed out countless roads and bridges, as well as streetcar and rail lines.

For a short time, Los Angeles was even cut off from the outside world and the damage was the final straw for proponents of flood control on the Los Angeles River.

The full story is over at the Metro Library's Primary Resources blog with links to numerous photos, maps and stories in a 1938 publication from the California Department of Highways and Public Works.

Transit and transportation planning, construction and operations must take into account numerous interdisciplinary fields.

These include urban planning, geology, law, sociology, demographics, engineering, hydrology, sustainability, cartography, history and other disciplines.

Metro’s Library & Archive collects, preserves and provides access to a wealth of information related to these subjects. Perhaps surprising to some, paleontology also intersects with transit.

Local subway tunneling has yielded a wealth of fossils which have shed light on prehistoric Los Angeles.

Mastodons on the Red Line?

The Library’s Primary Resources Blog takes a closer look at the fossils found through subway construction and how they give us a better idea of what L.A. looked like millions of years ago

Check it out here.

The Olympics may be coming to a close in London, but the Metro Library’s Primary Resources Blog is serving up a local double-header of Olympics history.

Back in 1932, Los Angeles welcomed the world to a much smaller affair during the Great Depression.  (Only 1,500 athletes from 37 nations took part, with the Olympic Village in Baldwin Hills).

The Metro Library’s Primary Resources blog explores in depth how the the city moved athletes and spectators around 80 years ago — when L.A. was criss-crossed by the streetcars and interurban rail lines of one of the largest transit systems on the planet.

Fast forward a half-century:  Los Angeles welcomes the world back, despite that rail system having been completely dismantled for more than two decades.

How did Los Angeles transport athletes, spectators and millions of local residents through the first Olympics staged in a city without a rapid transit system since 1960?

Primary Resources takes an extensive look at how L.A. managed to pull off a Olympic-sized feat in 1984, greatly reducing traffic and smog throughout the region thanks to a comprehensive transportation plan built entirely around a fleet of buses.

This past weekend, the Metro Transportation Library & Archive logged its 2,000,000th view of its online Flickr photo collection.

Since launching less than four years ago, the Library has become a national leader in the early adoption of social media, including resource sharing such as Flickr.

The collection now numbers more than 8,000 and spans all of Metro’s predecessor agencies dating back to the 1870s.

This post explains the value of providing digital access to our transportation legacy and highlights some of the more recent additions to the collection, many of which have never been seen before.

They include early 20th century views of the Mount Lowe Railway, renderings from early Metro Rail planning (anyone for overhead rail lines through Hollywood?), Los Angeles’ 1970′s exploration of People Mover personal rapid transit, opening day for the Cahuenga Pass Freeway in 1940, and much more.

The entire story and links to the images can be found at the Library’s Primary Resources blog.