California hit by Flooding, Landslides as Atmospheric River Departs

54

Residents in Southern California have had enough of storms this winter. On Wednesday, they got hit by one last storm which flooded roads, caused mudslides and knocked down trees.

On Tuesday, at the premiere of “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” in Los Angeles, celebrities walked down a very wet red carpet as there has been twice the usual amount of rain in that area.

The movie stars – Zachary Levi, Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu and Rachel Zegler – were walking across a very wet rug and couldn’t help but get their feet wet.

Rachel complained that her feet were wet, saying “I’m a little bit bummed, I’m not gonna lie.”

On top of this, the roads were all covered with water, mud and rocks, as well as lots of potholes which caused many cars to break down. The Pacific Coast Highway near Huntington Beach was also closed due to the flooding.

So far this year, the National Weather Service reported that about 24 inches of rain has fallen in Los Angeles and it is the 14th most rainfall ever since records started 140 years ago. Last night an overnight mudslide happened onto a road in Baldwin Hills and two cars were trapped in it. Another nearby hill collapsed too which put a home at risk of getting damaged.

The storms and rain throughout Southern California are expected to slow down on Wednesday evening and move towards the Great Basin region. Tuesday’s heavy rainfall left many parts of Northern and Central California dry. Parts of San Francisco saw powerful winds that shattered windows in high-rises and reached up to 74 mph (119 kph). There are still over 187,000 people without power today according to PowerOutage.us.

All around California, almost 27,000 people had to leave their homes and more than 61,000 were told to be ready to evacuate due to the weather. 676 of these people went to special shelters for the night.

This week, California was hit by a big storm, and the northeast part of America had another, much bigger storm. That caused some roads to be very foggy and slippery, a bunch of schools to be closed and many people lost their power.

Despite California’s rainy season coming to end, there are still flood warnings in effect for a few rivers like Salinas and Pajaro in Monterey County and some other rivers in Central Valley. This is because the water keeps flowing down from all the rain that started back in late December.

Recently, a strong storm caused the Pajaro River levee to break which led people living nearby having to evacuate their homes due to flooding on nearby farmland or agricultural communities. Most of these evacuations happened in Monterey County.

On Tuesday afternoon, the first stage of patch up work on the breach which was 400 feet (120 meters) long got finished. As soon as possible, crews are working to get this gap back to its rightly supposed level of height.

Before December and January, California faced a difficult drought situation but an unexpected series of storms came that suddenly created snow in the Sierra Nevada region and also flooded the estimate areas.

In February, it got really cold and a bunch of big storms came. They made so much snow that some buildings were destroyed in the mountains. The Governor declared emergencies in 43 out of 58 counties across the state. Also, there is way more snow than usual on April 1st according to the Department of Water Resources.

The weather service said it will be cool and wet in California this weekend, then another big storm is expected to come next week. Krysta Fauria, an AP Photojournalist, helped report this news.