A fierce atmospheric river storm that has battered California for days began to ease in Los Angeles on Tuesday, but officials warned that even small amounts of additional rainfall could trigger landslides in rainy Southern California.
Between Sunday and Tuesday morning, the storm dumped record rainfall in the Los Angeles Basin and prompted millions of residents to stay home to avoid potential danger. By Tuesday, Los Angeles officials had counted more than 300 mudslides and 35 damaged structures in the city, many of them in the hills above Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Five of these buildings were deemed no longer safe to enter.
The atmospheric river had intensified south of Los Angeles by Tuesday morning and was dumping rain in Orange, San Diego and San Bernardino counties. The National Weather Service warned of the possibility of flash flooding in Anaheim, Newport Beach and Santa Ana.
In less than 48 hours, the storm has unleashed as much as a third of a year’s worth of annual rainfall on parts of Orange County, said Elizabeth Adams, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s San Diego office. He said the rain is not expected to stop until the weekend, with another storm system moving into the area on Wednesday.
“We’re going to have a lot more rain over the next few days,” Ms Adams said.
In Los Angeles, where the storm was weakening, rain is likely to continue into the evening, with a chance of some scattered showers on Wednesday, said Ariel Cohen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Los Angeles.
Mr. Cohen said the ground was extremely saturated after what he called one of the wettest storm systems to hit the greater Los Angeles area since record-keeping began. He warned Angeleno to stay alert Tuesday, even if the skies looked bluer.
“This is not the time to let our guard down,” Mr Cohen said at a news conference on Tuesday morning. “Because the soils are so saturated, supersaturated in fact — with six to 12 inches of rain across the region — it will take very little additional rain to trigger landslides, mudslides and other debris flows. Everyone should be on high alert.”
Across Southern California, dozens of people had to be rescued from flooding and raging seas, including a Los Angeles County man who jumped into the raging Los Angeles River to try to save his dog. In the Baldwin Hills neighborhood, an avalanche of mud tore through a bedroom of a home.
But overall, the area hasn’t experienced the worst flooding and other impacts it had prepared for, said Lindsey Horvath, a Los Angeles County supervisor.
“Instead, the damage was more than 1,000 cuts – sinkholes, downed trees, areas of erosion,” he said at a news conference Monday night.
Firefighters evacuated 16 people in the Studio City neighborhood on Monday after two homes on Lockridge Street sustained significant damage from debris that the storm sent rushing through the area.
Residents walked the road almost in a daze Monday morning, surveying the piles of mud and jumble of rocks strewn across the road. Ankle-deep water gushed down a hill, carrying bits of debris with it. Some residents of the tree-lined streets near Lockridge Road shoveled mud that had collected on their streets as city maintenance trucks drove back and forth, trying to clear the road.
Elsewhere in Los Angeles, residents temporarily returned to the world Monday, walking through waterlogged intersections. Although officials urged people to stay off the streets, nearly all campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District remained open and classes were expected to be back in session Tuesday.
In Northern California, residents were still recovering from damage caused by strong winds that topped 90 mph in some locations on Sunday. At one point, more than 850,000 businesses and homes were without power as winds toppled power lines and damaged other electrical equipment in what Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility, said Sunday was among the top three days outages ever caused by storms.
The winds also became deadly. A 41-year-old man in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael and an 82-year-old man in Yuba City, north of Sacramento, were killed by falling trees in their yards. In the Santa Cruz Mountains, a 45-year-old man died when a tree fell on his home on Sunday. The three deaths so far were the only deaths from the storm.
During a press conference Monday afternoon, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass stepped aside to take a call from President Biden. When she returned to the podium, she held her cell phone next to the microphone with the president still on the other end. Mr. Biden, on a loudspeaker, called the city’s efforts “a hell of a business” and said he had just gotten off the phone with Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“We will take any help on the road as soon as you ask for it,” Mr. Biden said. “Well, just let me know. That’s why I’m calling.”
Jill Cowan contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
