The story told by the image below seems to be that a lot of frozen precipitation fell on Los Angeles. But in the distance the ground is bare. Furthermore, the surface of the hail-fall, if that's what it is, is hummocky, evidence that it was scraped up from a larger area elsewhere, dumped there and underwent subsequent melting. Another possibility is that it is dirt underneath that is hummocky, perhaps the remains of a construction project, and the hail or sleet is just a thin layer on top of it.

(For discussion of the second image, scroll down.)

The photo below tells an even more incredible story: that the stuff fell in the middle of a street and blocked traffic! This apparently is what the caption writer was led to believe.

It takes some study before we realize that the foreground is not street at all: the street in the background makes a right angle -- in from the rear, out to the right. We see in the first picture (above) that no street goes off to the left to make this an intersection. The white car therefore must be parked in a driveway. The boy with the shovel is not clearing the way for it to go forward in the driveway or onto whatever is under the piled up white stuff; he's been posed there by the photographer.

The brown car positioned broadside is a key element in the confusion: it seems to be on the wrong side of the street. Visually, it interrupts the continuity between foreground and background. And because the picture is a telephoto shot, the relationship between near and far is all the more suspect. It looks almost as if the picture is a three-layer collage of foreground, brown car, and a background lifted from some other locale.

But if we suppose that the brown car has pulled up on the left side of a lightly-travelled street so that the child inside can look at the curious scene of boys posing for a photographer, these pictures begin to make sense.

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