«If anyone has any questions about Mother Nature and her fury, if anyone has any questions about what this is all about in terms of what’s going on with the weather and the changes that we’re experiencing, come to California,» the governor said. .
California’s latest atmospheric river was one of two storm systems to lock down the US this week. Parts of New England and New York were reeling from a Northeast Wednesday that led to tens of thousands of power outages, numerous school cancellations and blackout conditions on highways.
The remaining showers in Southern California were expected to ease through Wednesday night as the storm moved toward parts of the Great Basin. The weather service said California will see minor precipitation this weekend, followed by another substantial storm next week.
Three clifftop apartment buildings were evacuated Wednesday morning when dirt slid from their backyards on the San Clemente shoreline, the Orange County Fire Authority said. Residents were also evacuated from a nearby building while the severity of the slide was studied.
Orange County had already declared a local emergency when a similar hillside collapsed on March 3 in Newport Beach, leaving a home uninhabitable and endangering others.
For downtown Los Angeles, the National Weather Service said just under two feet of rain has been recorded so far this hydrological year, making it the 14th wettest in more than 140 years of records.
A mudslide overnight on a highway in the Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles County trapped two cars, KNBC-TV reported. Another hill in the neighborhood also gave way, threatening the foundation of a hilltop home.
The weather in the northern and central sections of the state had dried out earlier, following heavy rain Tuesday and fierce winds that blew out the windows of a San Francisco skyscraper and gusted to 74 mph at the city’s airport.
Forty-three of the state’s 58 counties have been under a state of emergency due to the storms.
Even as California’s rains are diminishing, flood warnings remain in effect for the central shoreline of the Salinas and Pajaro rivers in Monterey County and other rivers in the Central Valley as water runs off the land that it has been saturated by storms since the end of December.
Runoff from a powerful atmospheric river last week burst a levee on the Pajaro River, causing bowel movements as water inundated farmland and farming communities. Nearly half of the people under evacuation orders were in Monterey County. Closed sections of Pacific Coast Highway in the area were expected to reopen Wednesday night.
The first phase of repairs to the 400-foot levee breach was completed Tuesday afternoon and crews were working to raise the section to its full height, county officials said.
Damage continued to emerge in other parts of the state. In the Sequoia National Forest, the Alta Sierra ski resort said it would be closed for at least two weeks due to extensive flooding and infrastructure damage, citing the US Forest Service. There is also a «mass slide potential on the road that services the resort, the resort tweeted.
California was mired in a deep drought before an unexpected series of atmospheric rivers swept into the state from late December to mid-January, causing flooding while packing a staggering layer of snow on the Sierra Nevada.
Arctic air-driven storms followed in February, creating blizzard conditions that buried mountain communities under so much snow that structures began to collapse.