California storm brings flooding, damage with more rain to come -

LOS ANGELES — California residents on Monday endured a historic onslaught of rain that turned glitzy Los Angeles neighborhoods into rivers of mud, flooded roads and toppled trees as authorities warned of more rain on the way.

The atmospheric river that began Sunday arrived with howling winds that gusted above 100 miles per hour in some places and launched what the National Weather Service described as “one of the most dramatic weather days in recent memory.”

As Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) declared a state of emergency in eight heavily populated counties across Southern California, rescue workers pulled 19 people off a 40-foot sailboat with a snapped mast and extracted drivers from swamped cars. At least two people were killed by falling trees farther north in the state. By Monday afternoon, around half a million people in California remained without power.

The deluge is part of a growing pattern of supercharged storms feeding off unusually warm waters in the Pacific Ocean driven by climate change and the periodic pattern known as El Niño that returned last year. The storm dropped up to 10 inches of rain across the Los Angeles area since Sunday, more than falls in some years, and the Weather Service warned that the already significant flooding was expected to worsen.

The storm unleashed torrents of water across the state. Retaining walls collapsed, boulders and trees crashed down on roadways, mudslides damaged homes, and flash floods closed down portions of Interstate 5 and other major highways.

“Stay safe and off the roads,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told residents during a news conference Monday from the city’s emergency operations center. “Only leave your house if it is absolutely necessary.”

City firefighters rescued a man and his dog from the flooded Los Angeles River during an atmospheric river storm on Feb. 5. (Video: LAPD)

In the rural mountain community of Boulder Creek, Calif., southwest of San Jose, one person was killed when a tree fell onto their home Sunday afternoon, Ashley Keehn, a spokesperson for the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, told The Washington Post. The victim is not being identified pending notification of family. A second man was killed by a downed redwood tree in his backyard in Yuba City, north of Sacramento, the local police department said in a statement early Monday.

Four people who were reported missing after a possible avalanche in the mountains near Las Vegas were found, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said.

But emergency personnel in the Los Angeles area — among the hardest-hit areas — said the storm hasn’t been particularly destructive so far compared with past disasters.

“We aren’t seeing major, major impacts,” Emily Montanez, associate director of the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management, said in an interview. She attributed that in part to early warnings and encouraging people not to be out on the roads. “People stayed home.”

Montanez said that the county was “not completely out of the woods” and that pockets of heavy rain could still fall, but more intermittently.

Up among the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, the deluge draped the mountains in a thick blanket of snow, a welcome sign for the state’s water supply as the snowpack has been running below average this year. The Central Sierra Snow Laboratory in the mountain town of Soda Springs recorded nearly 2 feet of snow over the past two days, and other spots have seen more.

But the storm brought a swampy mess for millions of people in the Los Angeles area, who endured Sunday what was the 10th-wettest day in the history of the city dating back nearly 150 years, according to Bass. The downpour of more than 4 inches downtown easily surpassed the city’s monthly average.

Across Los Angeles, the city’s police, firefighters and other emergency personnel responded to more than 130 flooding incidents, 49 mud and debris flows, and drivers stuck in floodwaters, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley said at the news conference.

In one incident, a mudslide crashed into two homes in Fryman Canyon, a forested neighborhood in Studio City surrounded by hills and trails. At about 10 p.m. Sunday, the river of mud coursed into Jessica Rouse’s living room. She and her father, stepmother, and brother sprinted out the door, over a fence and onto the neighbor’s sloping driveway.

Rouse said they weren’t able to grab anything before leaving, not even the family’s pet turtle, who was swept away by the mud.

“It all happened so fast,” Rouse said. “He was floating away, and they were trying to catch him and couldn’t.”

Los Angeles authorities evacuated 16 people from the area, where some homes flooded and others were hit by falling trees.

Firefighters were also responding Monday to a mudslide on Beverly Drive in the Hollywood Hills.

“The hazards of this storm have not passed,” Crowley said during the midday news conference. “We anticipate another wave of heavy rains later on this afternoon.”

During the downpour Sunday night, Karen Moureaux left her Ventura County home when she heard the scraping of heavy machinery. Her neighbors amid the citrus and avocado farms in Fillmore had taken an excavator and worked for hours dredging up mud to try to dislodge a blocked culvert that was flooding the road.

Ever since the 2017 Thomas Fire burned through the area, flooding has worsened, Moureaux said, including last year when floodwaters from Sespe Creek reached her farm.

“You always worry about that road because you know it’s going to flood,” said Moureaux, who grows Valencia oranges and operates a dog-boarding kennel. “It’s not really a creek; it’s a raging river when we get water.”

As waters rose in Santa Barbara on Sunday afternoon, residents said they had been hit so hard before by megastorms that they were getting used to it.

As Bath Street filled with murky water, one woman paced on her porch, hoping she would get lucky like she did last year, when the flood stopped at her front door. Standing on his steps in Crocs, Bix Kaufman and his roommate, Alex Clark, who was drinking a beer, pointed out neighbors who got “rocked” last year. Kaufman said watching his street fill with enough water to canoe down now seems normal.

“I think we’re a little desensitized from it from last time because it was so intense,” he said. “There’s no flood insurance around here, and it’s probably impossible to get.”

Santa Barbara has been a microcosm of extreme climate events, notes Thomas Tighe, the CEO of Direct Relief, an aid nonprofit headquartered in the city. In the last six years, the coastal county endured what was the largest wildfire in state history at the time and the 2018 Montecito mudslides, which killed 23 people. Tighe lost his home in that disaster and just finished rebuilding.

“It’s just the way it is now,” said Tighe, adding that his organization is seeing these trends everywhere. “It’s clear that we all need to adapt, adjust, and take care of each other as the public officials adapt rapidly, too.”

Despite the downpour, Los Angeles public schools, the second-largest public school district in the country, with more than 400,000 students, planned to remain open for the day, as of Monday morning, with the exception of two schools.

In the center of this storm, the air pressure dropped quickly and drastically, strengthening into what is known as a “bomb cyclone.” Such low-pressure systems can spin up fierce winds, and this one tied for California’s strongest bomb cyclone in the past 14 years. The powerful low-pressure system dragged a large plume of water vapor from Hawaii to the West Coast.

Such atmospheric rivers provide critical snow and rain to the West Coast’s annual water supply, but too much rain in a short amount of time can be devastating.

The amount of snow in California’s mountains has been below average so far this winter. The state’s average snowpack was only 57 percent of normal as of Friday. This storm system will push up that number.

Over the next day or so, the storm is expected to weaken near the California-Oregon border, but the atmospheric river will remain parked around Southern California. Heavy rain will probably continue from Los Angeles down to San Diego, with an additional 2 to 4 inches possible through Tuesday morning.

The storm system will travel eastward midweek, spreading rain and snow into Arizona, Nevada and further toward the Rocky Mountain front. In Phoenix, the additional rain could cause flooding across the already saturated soil.

Desert locations on the southwestern Nevada-California border also could be prone to flooding, as an additional 1 to 2 inches of rain are forecast. Mountains in Nevada, Utah, Colorado and surrounding regions may also see a foot or more of snow midweek.

Sacks reported from Los Angeles, Partlow from Olympia, Wash., and Patel from Washington. Amudalat Ajasa and Ian Livingston in Washington, Leo Sands in London, and Matthew Cappucci in Alaska contributed to this report.

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