California flooding live: Deadly storm leaves four dead as mudslides ravage LA

Los Angeles county officials warned residents to stay away from streams and rivers due to the serious dangers they posed following the severe storm.

LA County shared a video of firefighters and law enforcement officials on a bridge in the city overlooking a fast-flowing current. “The water can rise quickly and without warning, sweeping away people and objects in its path,” wrote the county of LA.

Californians living at higher elevations were forecasted to have continued snowfall throughout Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

Up to 24 inches have already blanketed high-elevation areas of Mount Baldy in Southern California, the NWS reports.

The past few days have seen the atmospheric weather systems batter California, record rainfall, wind gusts and mudslides – in some cases smashing previous state records.

Here are some of the big numbers, per the Associated Press, that have been reported since Sunday:

12 inches: One of the rainiest spots in Los Angeles County was in the hills of Bel Air. The neighbourhood – which is around 12 miles to the northwest of the city received 12.01 inches of rain between Sunday and Tuesday morning.

In just two days, downtown Los Angeles got soaked by more than 7 inches — nearly half of the 14.25 inches it normally gets per year, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). According to the NWS despite being just six days into the month it is already the 13th wettest February on record.

102 mph: An immensley powerful wind gust was recorded Sunday at Pablo Point, at an elevation of 932 feet, in Marin County, just north of San Francisco.

While just missing the December 1995 record of 103 mph at Angel Island, “102 is very, very impressive,” said meteorologist Nicole Sarment at the National Weather Service’s Bay Area office.

The top 10 strongest gusts — between 102 and 89 mph — recorded at the height of the weekend’s winds were all in Marin and nearby Santa Clara County, the weather service said.

The mudslides closed roads across the city and prompted ongoing evacuation orders in canyon neighborhoods with burn scars from recent wildfires. That number could rise because rain was still falling, saturating already sodden hillsides that threatened to give way, authorities said.

So far seven buildings have been deemed uninhabitable, with at least 10 were yellow-tagged, meaning residents could go back to get their belongings but could not stay there because of the damage.

45 people from Isla Vista, California have been evacuated from their homes after rain dangerously eroded a cliff, local outlet News Channel 3-12 reports.

Santa Barbara County Supervisor Laura Capps said no injuries have been reported as local officials evacuate the area.

“The storms underscore the pressing need for bluff and cliff safety, as seen by a bluff facing balcony collapse at a private property in IV this morning,” Ms Capps said in a statement.

Firefighters responded to a heavy debris flow in the Beverly Crest area of Los Angeles on Sunday night, evacuating seven homes. Residents tell Mike Bedigan they had ‘not even remotely had anything like this before’

More than 120,000 homes in California are without power going into Tuesday afternoon local time, according to PowerOutage.us.

Officials are warning residents to stay away from the downed powerlines causing many of these outages.

“If you see down lines, call and report, do not touch or attempt to cross,” officials with the CAL Fire unit for Nevada-Yuba-Placer posted on X.