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Historic StormsCyclone brings more rain to California
California suffered heavy rain on Wednesday, due to a cyclone which is likely to worsen the floods and landslides caused by a series of deadly deluges.
Cars trapped by a flood in Planada, California on January 11, 2023.
Getty Images via AFP
The torrential rains of the previous days on soils already saturated with water generated vast power cuts, numerous floods, uprooted many trees and cut off major roads, the floods sometimes carrying motorists. Some regions have recorded levels of precipitation not reached for 150 years.
“A huge spinning cyclone off the West Coast will once more bring heavy rainfall and gusty winds (Wednesday), this time targeting Northern California,” according to the US Weather Service (NWS) in its latest advisory. dated. The region might receive up to 18 cm of precipitation in places. By midday Wednesday, nearly 60,000 homes were without power.
In Aptos, a small town just over an hour’s drive south of San Francisco, residents were trying to recover from the floods of the past few days. “It’s probably the worst flooding I’ve seen since I moved here in 1984,” Doug Spinelli told AFP. The city stream “flowed so violently, (…) there were tree trunks that broke into the river, almost one every thirty seconds,” said this resident. “It was incredible to see the amount of debris and wood carried by the torrent.”
The governor of California visited this region of Santa Cruz County on Tuesday, one of the most affected by serial storms. On the spot, he warned once morest those to come, less powerful but just as dangerous. “This place is soaked. And now, a more modest amount of precipitation can have a greater impact in terms of conditions on the ground,” he warned the press. “We are not at the end of our troubles. We expect the storms to continue at least until January 18,” he added.
child still missing
According to its services, the storms of the past few weeks have caused at least 17 deaths, “more than the forest fires of the past two years”. In Paso Robles, in the center of the state, a five-year-old child was swept away by the floods on Monday while his mother was driving him to school. He was still missing on Wednesday. “Neighbors were able to rescue the mother, but the boy floated in another direction and might not be rescued at the time,” a spokesperson for the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff told media. premises. “We will continue to search until we find him,” he added.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the deadly toll of recent storms includes motorists trapped by flooding in their cars, residents crushed by falling trees, a couple killed by a landslide and bodies washed away by the waves.
On Monday, the town of Montecito, a celebrity haunt near Santa Barbara where Prince Harry and Meghan Markle live, was targeted by an evacuation order, lifted the next day.
California is currently undergoing “an endless onslaught of atmospheric rivers,” the likes of which have not been seen since 2005, according to the NWS. Rarely do these “rivers of the sky”, which are formed by water vapor from the tropics and travel to pour down cloudbursts onto the West Coast of the United States.
While it is difficult to establish a direct link between these series of storms and climate change, scientists regularly explain that warming increases the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
Last week’s storm had already knocked out power to tens of thousands of people, caused heavy flooding and triggered landslides. It had come just days following another deluge of rain on New Year’s Eve.
However, they will not be enough to replenish the water reserves in California. Several winters of above-normal rainfall would be needed to compensate for the drought of recent years, experts say.
(AFP)
