Deadly storm batters soggy Calif.
Landslides, heavy rain cause havoc as new system looms
LOS ANGELES — Sinkholes swallowed cars and raging torrents swamped towns and swept away a small boy Tuesday as California was wracked by more wild weather while the next system in a powerful string of storms loomed on the horizon.
Millions of people were still under flood warnings, and more than 200,000 homes and businesses were without power because of heavy rains, hail and landslides. Thousands have been ordered to evacuate their homes.
At least 17 people have died from storms that began late last month, said Wade Crowfoot, the California natural resources secretary. The deaths included a pickup truck driver and motorcyclist killed Tuesday morning when a eucalyptus tree fell on them on Highway 99 in the San Joaquin Valley near Visalia, the California Highway Patrol said.
The storm that began Monday dumped more than a foot of rain at higher elevations in central and Southern California and buried Sierra Nevada ski resorts in more than 5 feet of snow.
Rockfalls and mudslides shut down roads, and gushing runoff turned sections of freeways into waterways. Swollen rivers swamped homes and triggered evacuation orders.
Residents of the small agricultural community of Planada, on a main highway leading to Yosemite National Park, were ordered Tuesday to pack up and leave after Bear Creek overflowed and flooded some homes.
A break in the weather
Tuesday on the central coast allowed searchers near San Miguel to look for Kyle Doan, the child who vanished after he and his mother were stranded in a truck in rising waters. His mother was rescued, but Kyle was swept away, and a seven-hour search Monday turned up only one of his shoes.
“It’s still very dangerous out there,” said San Luis Obispo County sheriff’s spokesperson Tony Cipolla. “The creeks are very fast-flowing.”
The wet and blustery weather left California’s large homeless population in a precarious situation. At least one homeless person has died, and more than a dozen people were rescued from a homeless encampment on the Ventura River.
Theo Harris, who has been living on the streets of San Francisco since getting out of jail in 2016, fortified
his shelter with tarps and zip ties and took in his girlfriend after her tent flooded.
“The wind has been treacherous, but you just got to bundle up and make sure you stay dry,” Harris said. “Rain is part of life. It’s going to be sunny. It’s going to rain. I just got to strap my boots up and not give up.”
While the storms have provided much-needed moisture to offset a withering drought, their fury and frequency have created trouble that is expected to last into next week.
The latest atmospheric rivers — long plumes of moisture stretching out into the Pacific that can drop staggering amounts of rain and snow — began easing in some areas. But flooding and mudslides could follow, even during a brief respite, because the ground remains saturated.
More rain was forecast to arrive Wednesday in Northern
California, and then a longer storm system was predicted to last from Friday until next Tuesday.
President Joe Biden issued an emergency declaration Monday to support storm response and relief efforts in more than a dozen counties.
The weather service issued a flood watch through Tuesday for the entire San Francisco Bay Area, along with the Sacramento Valley and Monterey Bay. Areas hit by wildfires in recent years faced the possibility of mud and debris sliding down bare hillsides.
Forecasters warned that southwestern California could see 60 mph wind gusts at the peak of the storm, and some areas could receive up to a half-inch of rain per hour. Tornadoes that had been forecast never materialized.
In South San Francisco, high winds ripped part of the roof off a large apartment
building.
The squalls and flooding have forced school cancellations in some communities and intermittently shut down sections of major roadways that have flooded and turned into gushing rivers or been blocked by trees, rocks and landslides.
In Los Angeles, a sinkhole swallowed two cars Monday night in the Chatsworth area. Two people escaped by themselves, and firefighters rescued two others, authorities said. Another sinkhole damaged 15 homes in the rural Santa Barbara County community of Orcutt.
In the wealthy seaside community of Montecito, 80 miles northwest of Los Angeles, evacuation orders were lifted Tuesday. The community had been told to evacuate on the fifth anniversary of a mudslide that killed 23 people and destroyed more than 100 homes.
Several miles down the coast another town, La Conchita in Ventura County, was ordered evacuated. A mudslide killed 10 people there in 2005.
Jamie McLeod’s property had been under the Montecito evacuation order, but she said there was no way for her to “get off the mountain” with a rushing creek on one side and a mudslide on the other. The owner of the Santa Barbara Bird Sanctuary said one of her employees came to make a weekly food delivery and also became stuck.
McLeod, 60, said she feels fortunate because her home sits on high ground and the power is still on. But she tires of the frequent evacuation orders since the massive wildfire followed by the deadly landslide five years ago.
“It is not easy to relocate,” she said. “I totally love it, except in catastrophe.”