While tropical storms have, rarely, reached southern California, there is no record of a hurricane ever reaching the coastline there. A deadly tropical storm took 45 lives in 1939, and Tropical Storm Kathleen caused lots of flooding on September 10, 1976. As for the future, who knows? Hurricanes seem to be increasing in size and number in the twenty-first century, and it is possible that one could travel across, say, northern Mexico and then reach southern California.