The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
California, parched for 5 years, is battered by rain
A powerful storm with near hurricane-force winds swept through Southern California on Saturday, killing at least two people and causing widespread disruptions, but providing a respite from five years of drought.
Amid one of the wettest winters in decades, more heavy rainfall was to strike Northern California starting today.
“I’ve been a meteorologist here for 25 years, and I personally can’t remember a storm that had that much wind with it,” said David Sweet in the Los Angeles office of the National Weather Service. “It was a very impressive storm.”
Parched for the past five years, California finds itself in some areas with too much water.
Workers have rushed to fix the damaged embankment of the Oroville Dam north of Sacramento, which this past week was weakened by water discharged from an emergency spillway. Some forecasts said that the area could be hardest hit by the new round of rainfall today.
At the Port of Los Angeles, winds reached 75 mph Friday, just above the threshold to be considered a hurricane, Sweet said. Rainfall on some inland mountain slopes reached 9 inches, the same amount of precipitation that would normally fall during an entire winter month.
Sweet described a plume of moisture extending from Hawaii to Southern California, bringing with it tropical moisture. “It was an atmospheric river,” he said.
The combination of wind and rain knocked down trees across the Los Angeles area, prompted mudslides, flooded freeways and opened up a sinkhole in the San Fernando Valley large enough to almost swallow two cars.
Tens of thousands of Southern California residents lost power during the storm, portions of Amtrak train service were suspended and dozens of flights were canceled or delayed.
The two storm-related deaths involved a person retrieved from a flooded vehicle and a man electrocuted by felled power lines.
The frequent winter storms are taking a toll on other parts of the state’s infrastructure, with landslides closing roads. A bridge at the tourist town of Big Sur was closed by authorities this past week, cutting off access to part of the town. An online map by the California Department of Transportation showed at least 70 road closings.
Although the state government has not officially declared the drought over, the winter rains and accumulated snow in the Sierra have given California water reserves not seen in years.
“You would be hardpressed to say we have a surface water drought right now,” said Jay Lund, a water expert at the University of California, Davis.
In a sign of the abundance of water, Southern California is no longer drawing from the Colorado River, Lund said.
“I can’t recall a time when we didn’t draw from the Colorado River Aqueduct,” he said.
On Friday, as the storm was pushing through Southern California, the snowpack in the Sierra overall was 174 percent above normal, according to the California Department of Water Resources. The accumulated snow serves as crucial water storage during the long and usually very arid summer months that are effectively an annual drought.