LOS ANGELES –
A storm that parked itself over Southern California for days, unleashing historic downpours that caused hundreds of landslides, was moving out of the region after one final drenching Wednesday, but authorities warned of the continued threat of collapsing hillsides.
The system dropped heavy rain and mountain snow overnight in San Diego County, then left behind scattered showers. A military helicopter that went missing overnight was found Wednesday in mountains east of San Diego, authorities said, but there was no immediate information on the fate of the five Marines who were aboard or if weather was involved.
Winter storm warnings and advisories continued in Southern California mountains and to the north in the Sierra Nevada.
The storm that came ashore last weekend was one of the wettest in Southern California history and caused at least 475 mudslides in the Los Angeles area after dumping more than a foot (30 centimetres) of rain in some areas, including the Hollywood Hills.
The weather began relenting Tuesday and evacuation orders were lifted for homes in flood- and slide-prone areas, including a canyon in Los Angeles County that was scarred by a 2022 fire and left with little or no vegetation to hold the soil in place.
Another fast-moving rain system was expected to move down through the state on Wednesday before giving way to fair weather for most of California by the weekend.
After back-to-back atmospheric rivers walloped California in a matter of days, it wouldn’t take much for more water, mud and boulders to sluice down fragile hillsides, experts warned.
“The ground is fully saturated and simply cannot hold any more water,” National Weather Service meteorologist Tyler Kranz said.
Nine deaths have been linked to the storm system throughout the state, but none were caused by slides.
On Tuesday, Dion Peronneau, in the Los Angeles suburb of Baldwin Hills, was trying to retrieve her artwork and books from her house. Mud knocked her sliding glass doors off their frame and poured into her home of 25 years.
“Eight feet of mud is pressed up against my window that is no longer there,” she said. “They put up boards to make sure no more mud can come in.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the city was looking toward helping people recover from the weather’s pounding. Officials will seek federal emergency money to help move homeless people out of shelters and to aid owners of damaged hillside homes where insurance companies wouldn’t cover the losses, she said.
But counting the damaged homes might take a while, she warned at a Tuesday evening news conference.
“The hillsides are soaked, some of them are still moving,” Bass said. “So hopefully no more homes will be damaged, but it’s too early to tell.”
Work crews, meanwhile, struggled to deal with the storm’s aftermath. Some 400 trees had fallen in the Los Angeles area alone, the city said.
Electrical outages were substantially reduced from levels at the peak of the storm. Statewide, more than 71,000 utility customers were without power, mostly in the northern and central areas, according to Poweroutage.us.
People were being urged to avoid touching downed lines for fear of electrocution and to steer clear of roadways at risk of floods and mud. During the storm, dozens of people in LA alone, including at least 50 stranded motorists, were rescued from fast-moving swollen creeks, rivers, roads and storm channels, fire officials said.
Stormy weather rolled into Northern California last weekend before moving south and stalling.
Four of the nine storm-related deaths were people who were hit by falling trees or limbs, according to Brian Ferguson, a spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. Another died in hospice when power failed, one drowned in the Tijuana River near the U.S.-Mexico border and three died in vehicle crashes, he said.
The deluge of precipitation has a silver lining, in that it helped boost the state’s often-strapped water supply.. The water content of the vital Sierra Nevada snowpack jumped to 73 per cent of average to date, up from 52 per cent on Jan. 30, state Department of Water Resources data showed. The snowpack provides about 30 per cent of California’s water when it melts.
At least 6 billion gallons (22.7 billion litres of storm water in Los Angeles alone were captured for groundwater and local supplies, the mayor’s office said. Just two years ago, nearly all of California was gripped by a devastating drought that strained resources and forced water cutbacks.
The latest storms followed a string of atmospheric rivers that pummelled the state last year and caused at least 20 deaths.
As the latest weather front moved east, it prompted warnings across the state line.
Parts of northern Arizona stretching southeast toward New Mexico were under a winter storm warning through 5 p.m. Wednesday, and a wide swath of central Arizona, including Phoenix, remained under a flood watch until Thursday morning.
The National Weather Service in Flagstaff, Arizona, said more than a foot (30 centimetres) of snow was possible in the upper elevations around the Grand Canyon by Wednesday evening, 8 to 15 inches (20 to 38 centimetres) were expected in Flagstaff and up to 18 inches (46 centimetres) were likely in the mountains east of Phoenix.
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Watson reported from San Diego. Associated Press journalists Stefanie Dazio, Christopher Weber, John Antczak and Damian Dovarganes in Los Angeles, Walter Berry in Phoenix, and Scott Sonner in Reno, Nevada, contributed.
