Storms End Water Restrictions for 7M in Southern California: What You Need to Know

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Good news, 7 million people in Southern California can finally go back to using a lot more water! The reason for this is because several big winter storms have helped with the state’s old drought problem.

A place called the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California provides water for 19 million people in six different counties. This district had put restrictions on how much water people could use last year while they were dealing with an extreme lack of it. But now these restrictions are gone thanks to all the rain!

The district’s board made a decision on Tuesday that removed all the restrictions in certain parts of Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino Counties. These rules restricted people to only water outdoors once each week.

The heavy rains kept coming this week and will continue next week with yet another big storm coming our way. This has caused reservoirs to be filled up beyond their capacity, leading to flooding problems throughout California.

This was an update with breaking news – here’s what had happened before:

The eleventh big storm of the season just ended in California. It caused a lot of damage, like flooding, landslides and broken trees. People are trying to get everything clean again before the next winter storm arrives.

Across California, 27,000 people have been ordered to leave their homes and an additional 61,000 were being told to be prepared to evacuate because of the bad weather. During the night, 676 people stayed in emergency shelters.

Many roads had flooding or mud on them and there were rocks everywhere. Even worse, over 30 cars got stuck in potholes on a single freeway!

Parts of the Pacific Coast Highway near Los Angeles, California have been shut down because of flooding. This caused about 144,000 people to not have electricity in the state on Wednesday.

Gov. Gavin Newsom recently visited an agricultural area on the central coast to check out the damage caused by a huge flood. Weather experts think that there could be another storm next week, which will definitely cause more destruction and costs for repair. So far, no one knows how much this storm season has really hurt everything in terms of both buildings and money-wise.

The Governor said in the last few years it has gone from extremely hot and dry, with many fires, to lots of rain and snow. He suggested that if anyone doesn’t believe climate change is real, they should come to California and see how quickly the weather can change.

This week, California had a huge storm called an atmospheric river while New England and New York dealt with another big storm called a nor’easter. Many people’s power went out, loads of schools weren’t able to stay open, and roads were nearly impossible for cars to drive on due to the weather.

It looks like the rain in Southern California will die down through Wednesday night. The weather service said there won’t be much rain this weekend, but a bigger storm system is coming next week.

Early Wednesday morning, firefighters evacuated three apartment buildings located on the cliffs of San Clemente because the earth behind them slid away. They also had to clear out the people staying in a nearby building while they find out how big the slide actually was. Orange County declared an emergency after another hillside collapsed on March 3rd in Newport Beach and it left one house messed up while others were at risk.

In downtown Los Angeles, the National Weather Service said that this year has been the 14th wettest recorded in 140 years. Over 61 centimeters of rain has already fallen!

Last night, a mudslide happened on a road and two cars got stuck. Another part of the hill was also collapsing which might cause problems with a house on top of it.

The weather in the middle and northern sections of our state is not as wet anymore after it rained a lot on Tuesday. It was also very windy that day, so windy that it blew out some windows on a tall building in San Francisco and it was blowing really fast at the city’s airport (up to 74 mph). The governor declared an emergency in three more counties, making it 43 counties total out of all 58.

Even though it’s not raining in California anymore, people need to be careful. The Salinas and Pajaro rivers in Monterey County are still really full after being soaked by all the rain since December. All the other rivers in the Central Valley are also pretty full too.

Last week, huge amounts of rain caused the Pajaro River’s levee to break and everyone living in the nearby farms and towns had to evacuate. Most of these people were from Monterey County. Sections of the Pacific Coast Highway closed down because of this, but they will finally reopen again Wednesday night.

The workers finished fixing the 400-foot (120-meter) broken levee on Tuesday evening. They were then trying to make it reach back up again, according to county officials.

Even though the breach was fixed, they didn’t check or mend other levees as a safety measure – despite authorities telling us that rural levee systems haven’t been improved in years.

The Water Resources Department in California said that usually during a flood, local officials do patrols to check if the levees (a wall-like thing built to stop flooding) are safe. However, for the Pajaro River disaster, the state didn’t ask for any extra checks on the levees.

In California, there’s been lots of destruction from the storm! The Alta Sierra Ski Resort has to close for at least two weeks because the flooding and bad weather messed up the roads and part of their building. They said that it’s even possible for a big piece of land to slide off the highway that brings people to the resort.

California was in a really bad drought, but then there were these huge rainstorms that came from December to January. This helped the state by not only flooding it but also giving the Sierra Nevada mountains tons of snow! And then in February more storms with icy air came and made such a lot of snow that some places got buried under it and even had buildings collapse.

The amount of water in the Sierra snowpack is more than twice what it usually is on April 1st, according to the state Department of Water Resources.

On Tuesday at the premiere of “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” in Los Angeles, there was extra rain and the red carpet outside got really wet.

Zachary Levi, Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu, and Rachel Zegler were all there but they couldn’t stop themselves from getting a bit soaked while walking over it.

Zegler said, “My shoes are all wet and I’m not happy about it”.

Someone called Krysta Fauria helped to report this news.