Hi Richard!! I would have been furiously going to Navy ET-A school at TI by then. Now the winter, 68-9 was a corker "up here" my folks sent me photos of snow up to the tops of the fence posts. At some point they ran a dozer through downtown to clear a path (it was the highway back then) and wx in San Fran was kinda bad, too. I did not realize til later. They had all sorts of rain, flood, mudslides, for all I knew then, it was just "regular weather"
I got to Miramar in late May of 70. It was POURING rain that night and next morning, and cleared up and I don't think it rained for a year and half. AFTER I left, (74--77?) at some point they had floods there, and I saw news photos of car dealers along the I-8 frontage with water halfway up the building. That of course was the ditch they call the San Diego River
I found this re: '78 so that may be the one I was thinking of
My electrical engineering friend, who actually was born up here, in Bonners Ferry, ID, grew up in San Diego. (Paradise Valley.) He always had derisive things to say about what went on and was allowed to go on in the I-8 corridor, namely, "you build stuff in a dry river bed and then seem surprised when it gets wet."