The Times is writing for an audience that includes East Coasters, meaning that an ordinary occurrence in your life on the West Coast will be treated as unusual

The Times is writing for an audience that includes East Coasters, meaning that an ordinary occurrence in your life on the West Coast will be treated as unusual on the East Coast. (This is true in the general case: the newspaper doesn’t know what you or anyone else has been through; your responsibility as a reader is to infer whether you’re the intended audience, or whether the audience is people who haven’t had the same experience as you.)