California Storm Updates: More Rain Expected to Worsen Flooding

The battering from a series of storms has made a mess of major roads and highways across California. A massive boulder blocked a canyon road in Malibu, a hillside crumbled on a highway in Fresno and stretches of the well-traveled Highway 101 were turned into rivers.

The California Highway Patrol said parts of nearly a dozen highways were closed in the Central Coast region, where damage has been the most severe.

In the city of South San Francisco, extreme winds peeled back part of an apartment building’s roof Tuesday morning, allowing water to enter two apartments and forcing the evacuation of 10 residents, said Matt Samson, the city’s deputy fire chief. No one was injured.

Samson said the damage, which occurred around 2 a.m., has been among the worst the city has seen over the past two weeks. But he expects such problems to continue and has increased staffing in preparation, with wind gusts forecast to reach 70 m.p.h.: “It’s going to be a little longer until we get a break from this one.”

“Any gardener who has forgotten to water their flower patch during a heat wave has firsthand experience of this,” Dr. Shugar said.

Water can pond quickly on the hardened soil, and, depending on the terrain, will eventually run off. On steep slopes, the water rushing downhill can accelerate, eroding soil in its path, picking up rocks and debris and joining with other rivulets of water to make a growing and potentially destructive mudslide.

California’s drought has also helped fuel major wildfires in recent years, and post-wildfire slopes are especially susceptible to mudslides. On Monday, concern about potential mudslides prompted evacuations in Montecito, Calif., where 23 people were killed five years ago in a slide that occurred a month after a wildfire on the hills nearby.

After trees and other vegetation are killed in a fire, their roots weaken over the next several years, making the soil they are in less stable. By vaporizing waxy compounds in vegetation that are then deposited in the soil, extremely hot fires can also make soils water-repellent, increasing surface runoff when the rains come and raising the risk of a mudslide.

Mudslides, which are also referred to as debris flows, tend to be shallow, eroding the topmost layer of soil and picking up rocks and other debris on the surface.

But heavy rains can also cause major landslides, when a large part of a slope becomes saturated with water to great depth, increasing the pressure between soil particles and making the slope unstable.

The rugged hills along California’s coast are especially susceptible to this kind of landslide. In 2005, houses in the small town of La Conchita, just below the coastal highway, Route 1, in Southern California, were buried when the hillside gave way, killing 10 people.

Some major landslides may be moving in slow motion for years before heavy rain triggers a much faster-moving failure. After the 2017 slide in Big Sur in Northern California that is considered the largest in state history, when about 6 million cubic yards of debris slid across Route 1, NASA researchers used radar data to study the slope. They found that it had been moving at a rate of about 7 inches a year for about a decade.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, laying out his budget for the fiscal year, announced $202 million for levees and other flood risk protections. “Right now, what’s top of mind is flood investments,” he said, noting the state was being hit with a "conveyor belt of storms” that would continue in the coming days.

The state will also be spending $2.7 billion on measures aimed at limiting wildfires, and $8.6 billion on water and drought management, he said. After his budget presentation, Newsom is heading down to the state’s hard-hit Central Coast.

To repeat--and now with a visual: There is flooding in the Union Station pedestrian tunnel. To get from one end of station to the other, you can use the B/D Line subway. The turnstiles are unlocked. https://t.co/FX7rvpppGL

The nation was struck last year by 18 disasters that caused more than $1 billion each in damage. That’s the third-highest number in the 43 years that NOAA has been keeping records.

The only other years on record with more billion-dollar disasters. adjusted for inflation, are 2020 and 2021.

At the top of the 2022 list is Hurricane Ian, which caused $113 billion in damage, the country’s third-costliest hurricane since 1980 behind Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey. The drought and heat wave in the Western and Central United States was the second-worst disaster in 2022, causing $22 billion in damage.

All told, last year’s 18 large-scale disasters caused $165 billion in damage, according to NOAA — greater than the annual economic output of West Virginia and Alaska put together.

Here are some other reasons last year’s disasters stood out:

Hurricane Nicole, which struck Florida on Nov. 10, was the first November hurricane to make landfall in the United States in almost 40 years.

Typhoon Merbok, which damaged homes in Alaska, was “the strongest storm to enter the Bering Sea during September in 70 years.”

Alaska passed the million-acre mark for land burned by wildfires on June 18 — the earliest in the past 32 years. Average temperatures in Alaska were 2.6 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal last year, almost double the temperature increase in the contiguous United States.

At least 40 percent of the land mass of the mainland United States has been in drought for the past 119 weeks — longer than at any other time in the 22 years the U.S. Drought Monitor has been keeping track.

More tornadoes were reported in March 2022 than any other March on record, going back to 1950. There were 1,331 — three times the average for the month.

The Stockton Unified School District, which serves nearly 40,000 students, has cancelled classes for the second straight day because of storm damage to its campuses. The district also said that food supplies for school meals spoiled because of prolonged power outages. The Sacramento City Unified School District is resuming classes today at most campuses, after shutting down on Monday.

The four Malibu schools in the Santa Monica-Malibu School District switched to remote learning on Tuesday because of the storm, according to the district’s website. Parents were advised to watch for more information from their respective schools.

A map showing the precipitation forecast for California and surrounding areas for January 10 to January 15.

The full extent of flooding in the Los Angeles area was not immediately clear in the predawn hours of Tuesday morning. California’s Central Coast, where officials had ordered evacuations on Monday in a coastal enclave of Santa Barbara County, appeared to be the hardest hit area of a state that has been battered in recent weeks by powerful waves of moisture, known as atmospheric rivers.

But the Weather Service had warned on Monday evening that downtown Los Angeles, Malibu, Hollywood and Beverly Hills were among the places that would experience flash flooding. And as more than an inch of rain fell in some areas of the county that night, early images showed cars partially submerged by floods near downtown. The Los Angeles Fire Department also told an NBC affiliate that firefighters had rescued two people who were trapped inside a vehicle at the bottom of a sinkhole that opened in the Chatsworth area, north of downtown L.A.

And at Los Angeles International Airport, a so-called ground stop issued shortly after 8 p.m. by the Federal Aviation Administration slowed the pace of takeoffs and landings for about an hour amid high winds, said Victoria Spilabotte, a spokeswoman for the airport.

“That usually happens at airports across the country, but we don’t often have a ground stop, mostly because Los Angeles has pretty good weather year round,” she said. “So this type of storm is not typical for us.”

More bad weather was in the forecast. The Weather Service said early Tuesday morning that as the heavy precipitation in Southern California was beginning to taper, a new and “energetic” low-pressure system was gathering strength offshore.

Heavy precipitation was expected across much of the state on Tuesday, and parts of Southern California could see up to seven inches of rain over the next few days, the agency said. “The one good aspect of the recent heavy rains has been relief from the persistent drought that has been plaguing large portions of the West,” it added.

The flooding in Los Angeles on Monday night capped a frantic day in Santa Barbara County, where officials ordered thousands of residents to quickly evacuate the coastal enclave of Montecito amid fears of mudslides in an area where wildfires have made soils and vegetation less stable.

Up to a foot of rain was expected to soak Montecito’s already drenched hillsides. And the evacuation orders were issued five years to the day that a deadly torrent of mud and boulders rushed through neighborhoods in that mansion community, killing 23 people and turning it into a disaster area.

“We’re in the midst of a series of significant and powerful storms,” Sheriff Bill Brown of Santa Barbara County said in a briefing. “Currently, we’re experiencing a storm that is causing many problems and has the potential to cause major problems across our county, especially in the burn scar areas.”

Late Sunday, President Biden approved an emergency declaration for 17 counties in California, allowing for federal assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security in relief and rescue efforts.

Elsewhere along the Central Coast, one person was killed by floodwater while trying to navigate a submerged road in San Luis Obispo County, north of Santa Barbara, officials said on Monday. A 5-year-old boy remained missing. Residents were evacuated from numerous communities because of flood risks as their streets turned into gushing streams.

At the Best Western Plus Carpinteria Inn, several miles southeast of Montecito, a steady stream of people clad in rain gear pulled up in SUVs packed with luggage and provisions. Some who had evacuated said they were surprised to be among those ordered to leave because their homes were not in burn scars, areas hit by wildfire that are made more susceptible to landslides.

In the 2018 storm that led to the devastating mudslide, officials had issued mandatory evacuation orders for about 7,000 residents in Montecito and voluntary ones for another 23,000, but many disregarded them because they had just returned home after being forced to leave during a wildfire.

Montecito is a popular haven for celebrities, including Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex; Oprah Winfrey; and Ellen DeGeneres, who posted a video on Twitter of a raging creek behind her house that she said “never flows, ever.”

“We need to be nicer to Mother Nature because Mother Nature is not happy with us,” Ms. DeGeneres said.

Evacuation orders were also in place in neighboring Ventura County, including in the tiny community of La Conchita, the site of a 2005 landslide around the same time of year that killed 10 people.

In Santa Cruz County, about 70 miles south of San Francisco, more than 30,000 residents were placed under evacuation orders as creeks and rivers topped their banks, threatened homes and washed away at least one bridge. Mudslides blocked two highways in the Santa Cruz Mountains that connect the region to the San Francisco Bay Area.

The flooding in the county besieged an area already reeling from some of the heaviest damage from recent storms. Just last week, the confluence of a storm surge, high tides and high surf collapsed piers and flooded hundreds of homes and businesses.

The storm’s impacts continued farther south along the state’s Central Coast, with evacuation orders along rivers in Watsonville and Monterey County.

Numerous roads were closed amid flash-flood warnings in San Luis Obispo County, where the 5-year-old boy remained missing after he and his mother escaped from a car that was starting to be swept away by floodwaters. His mother, who had been driving him to school around 8 a.m., was rescued by nearby residents, but the boy was carried away by waters coursing down a rising creek, said Tony Cipolla, public information officer with the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office.

Divers with the agency’s underwater search and rescue team scoured the nearby waters for hours, but had to call off the search around 3 p.m. when the rising waters and rapid current made it too dangerous, he said.

Rivers and creeks in the area were gushing like they hadn’t in decades, said Scott Jalbert, the county’s emergency services manager. “They’re pretty monstrous,” he said.

California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo shut down for the day. The university reported that students, faculty and animals were being evacuated from agricultural facilities with a reservoir about to breach.

In the nearby town of Santa Margarita, Tamara Snow Nyren said that for all her preparations the night before — building a fort of sandbags all around her home — she was not ready for Monday’s flooding.

“My God, I look out the window to my alley, and I saw a river coming down my alley,” she said.

Jill Cowan reported from Carpinteria, Calif., Victoria Kim from San Francisco and Mike Ives from Seoul. Katya Cengel contributed reporting from Grover Beach, Calif.

Mr. Hawley’s parents started bringing him and his siblings to the beach house when he was 2, and Mr. Hawley, now the property manager, often rented it to family friends. He recalled sitting on the deck and watching the surf for hours with his father, who has since died. Mr. Hawley, 67, had hoped that one day his grandchildren would form similar memories there.

Instead, he was left with a sense of emptiness. “We’ve had two days to come to the conclusion that this house that’s been around for 65 years is no more,” he said, choking up.

A barrage of powerful storms has surprised residents across Northern California with an unrelenting period of extreme weather stretching over weeks, with only small intervals of dryness. These storms have toppled trees, washed out streets and knocked out power for hundreds of thousands, but they have been particularly devastating to the Santa Cruz region, where prolonged rain and wind have combined with the unique topography to inflict recurring damage.

Already drenched by a storm on Dec. 31, the Santa Cruz area — a tourist-friendly stretch of beaches on the Central Coast of California, 70 miles south of San Francisco — was again inundated in some parts with as much as five inches of rain and driving winds of up to 75 miles per hour on Wednesday and Thursday.

And the region was experiencing some of the worst effects of the latest storm, which arrived Monday in Northern California. In the Santa Cruz Mountains, a mudslide shut down two highways, and the San Lorenzo River flooded neighborhoods. Officials ordered new evacuations in the oceanside village of Soquel, and along the Carmel River near Monterey to the south.

An unlucky confluence of high tides, storm surge and high surf left hundreds of homes and dozens of businesses damaged by floodwater and mountains of sand this past weekend. The extreme conditions eroded coastlines and beaches, destroyed parts of several piers and forced many to evacuate low-lying homes.

“We’re very concerned,” said Dave Reid, the director of the Santa Cruz County Office of Response, Recovery & Resilience. “As you get more and more of these rain events piling on top of each other, our mountains literally begin to melt, and we get more landslides and damage to our infrastructure.”

Mr. Reid said the unrelenting nature of the storms, just days apart from one another, was exhausting emergency responders and impeding the county’s efforts to assess damage and begin repairs.

“We really consider this disaster to be the cumulative effect of all of these events in such a short time frame,” he said.

Santa Cruz has long been far rainier than its neighboring counties, mostly because of its topography, said Jan Null, a veteran meteorologist and former lead forecaster for the National Weather Service. Storms coming from the Pacific Ocean slam into the Santa Cruz Mountains, forcing the air to lift and become colder, which creates more precipitation.

“It’s not uncommon in any given storm to have four times the rainfall in the Santa Cruz Mountains as you do in San Francisco,” Mr. Null said.

The drastic differences in precipitation in places just 10 miles apart is a phenomenon rarely seen outside California, driven by the proximity of the ocean and mountains, he said.

“The whole theme of the Bay Area is microclimates,” he said.

The ferocity of the waves and severity of structural damage recalled, for some residents, memories of the disastrous 1982 storm that flooded rivers, badly damaged a bridge and killed 22 people, including 10 in a landslide that occurred just as a 30-hour rainstorm let up. In January of that year, the hillside above Love Creek, about 10 miles north of Santa Cruz, turned to liquid, with approximately 600,000 cubic yards of land — enough to fill 60,000 dump trucks — sliding down the mountain.

This year’s storm rivals 1982’s, “and nothing else in between has come close,” said Carin Hanna, 78, who owns the Craft Gallery gift shop in Capitola, a town next to Santa Cruz. “It shows the incredible force of the ocean,” she added.

Santa Cruz is also prone to flooding because its creeks and its biggest waterway, the San Lorenzo River, are not big enough to contain all of the water from heavy rainfall, experts say. Over the weekend, the river was so swollen that surfers were riding waves headed out to sea, rather than the other direction, and emergency responders warned of flood risks along the banks on Monday.

Parts of West Cliff Drive, a winding Santa Cruz road at the edge of the cliffs overlooking the ocean, were closed after chunks of the street were wiped out by 20-foot-tall waves. Earlier storms had already pounded at the cliffs and washed away some barriers, like riprap — giant rocks placed at the edge of the cliffs to protect against erosion — a frightening sight for some residents.

On Thursday morning, Lindsay Maggioncalda was on her laptop in a meeting for her job at Duolingo, the language platform, on the second floor of her oceanfront home in Santa Cruz. Suddenly, a wave struck the storm-resistant window mere feet away from where she was sitting on the couch.

“Tons of water just went bam, like a huge crash, big vibrations,” Ms. Maggioncalda, 25, said. “I was gasping.”

Her father, Jeff Maggioncalda, ventured into the soaked neighborhood to film the chaos, retreating quickly when more waves blasted through the gaps in the street near him.

“This was by far the worst storm we’ve seen,” said Mr. Maggioncalda, 54, the chief executive of the online education company Coursera.

During a dry period on Saturday, residents were doing their best to clear logs from their yards, replace soggy sandbags and shovel away the sand that had burst through their garage doors.

Walking on Rio Del Mar Beach in Aptos with her two dogs, Isaura Rochin, 52, was picking up trash that had swept onto the beach. In the distance, the S.S. Palo Alto, a World War I-era concrete tanker ship beloved by local residents, who know it as the Cement Ship, had been badly damaged by the storm, and part of the pier connecting it to Seacliff State Beach had crumbled into the sea.

“I’m sad about the wharf,” Ms. Rochin said. “The Cement Ship, I’m sad, but it’s been deteriorating for years and years.”

In Capitola, as rain began to drench the streets once again, Dominick King was rushing to save anything he could from his restaurant, My Thai Beach, before the next storm. The restaurant, along with many others next to the beach, was soaked by floodwater that crept up from the foundation, severing plumbing and warping the floor.

Mr. King, 34, had just remodeled the interior after inheriting the restaurant from his mother, who had struggled to steer it through the coronavirus pandemic. Now, he expects it to be closed for months.

“We were trying to get the business back on the right foot,” he said. “Things were going really good. It’s tough, man. It’s definitely a huge setback.”

Gary Griggs, a professor of earth sciences who has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, since the 1960s, said that the same spots in Santa Cruz, like the Capitola pier and West Cliff Drive, had been damaged once or twice a decade by storms, but that people had “short-disaster memory.”

He said the region needed to seriously consider moving development away from the coastline because there was no way to escape inevitable sea level rise.

“What this storm is telling us is it’s time to think a little more long term and make some decisions,” he said. “We’ve been Band-Aiding things together for a long time.”

Sacramento

Occidental

Oakland

Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz

In the days since that call on New Year’s Eve, cumulative storms have pummeled California — and Ms. Valentine and her family have huddled in an Airbnb with Charlie, who survived unharmed. As they have tried to schedule insurance adjusters, versions of their terrifying experience have proliferated across the nation’s most populous state.

Stressed by drought, whipped by wind and weakened at the roots by relentless rain and flooding, trees — tall and short, ancient and young, in mountain preserves and suburban yards — have toppled across California this week in breathtaking numbers, the most visible sign of a state veering between environmental extremes.

A procession of atmospheric rivers has interrupted an epic drought responsible for the driest three years on California record. The sudden swing from scarcity to excess with back-to-back storms is testing the state’s infrastructure broadly, straining the power grid, levees, drainage systems and roads from the Pacific Coast to the Sierra Nevada.

On Thursday, the pressure mounted as rain swelled rivers and snowy whiteouts obscured mountain passes. In San Francisco, trains were delayed amid systemwide disruptions on the Bay Area Rapid Transit. In Santa Cruz County, a tidal surge carried off parts of piers and forced the City of Santa Cruz to close its wharf as a safety measure. In Southern California, huge waves threatened lifeguard towers in Los Angeles County and flooded the Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach, as the rain moved southward.

By Friday morning, tens of thousands of customers, mostly in Northern California, were still without power as communities prepared for yet another round of drenching rain. Forecasters with the National Weather Service in the Bay Area said the next atmospheric river was expected to arrive late Friday and spread south to Central California on Saturday, raising the risk of more flooding and mudslides across the northern section of the state. Farther inland and around the Sacramento area, conditions were expected to be equally dangerous.

If the storm had a theme, it was in the uprooted and broken trees that seemed to blanket the rain-soaked landscape — a loss and a hazard that the director of the state water resources department, Karla Nemeth, had warned would be “the signature of this particular event.”

Falling trees slammed into power lines on the Central Coast, shut down Highway 101 in Humboldt County and snarled rail service in Burlingame and San Francisco. They injured a California Highway Patrol officer at a crash scene in San Jose and ensnared cars on rain-soaked roads in Marin County. On Wednesday, fire officials said, a redwood in the Sonoma County community of Occidental crashed into a mobile home, killing a toddler.

In the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland, a tree crashed through a public housing apartment on Wednesday, where Victoria James lives with her adult daughter, her two younger children and her 3-year-old granddaughter. “Everything shook and went black,” Ms. James said. “I thought it was an earthquake.”

When she saw branches poking through her ceiling and more limbs falling, she said, she grabbed the children and started running.

“There were live wires everywhere,” she said. “My neighbors had to direct us because it was pitch black out. We just left with what we had on our backs. Literally ran out — one kid didn’t even have on tennis shoes.”

In Sacramento, which bills itself as the “City of Trees,” the atmospheric rivers claimed nearly 1,000 trees in six days, according to the city’s urban forester, Kevin Hocker, who called the toll “much more than we’ve seen in other storms.” He estimated that 60 fell in one city park alone.

On the State Capitol grounds, a short distance from the spot where Governor Gavin Newsom was being inaugurated for a second term on Friday, a giant sequoia lay uprooted, felled by the storms and surrounded with hazard tape and scattered drifts of branches; its fall sheared the limbs off one side of a nearby Torrey pine. Paula Peper, a retired U.S. Forest Service urban ecologist in Sacramento, estimated that the giant sequoia had stood for 80 to 100 years, through as many as 18 governors.

At Sacramento City College, a downed cedar, huge and fragrant, blocked the entrance to campus. In a manicured neighborhood near the American River, Marco Leyva, a local landscaper, scrambled to retrieve fallen tree limbs, his truck piled high with redwood, oak and liquid amber. Some, he said, appeared to have fallen partway in the New Year’s Eve storm, “and then the wind this time just knocked them down.”

The toll on trees is more than ornamental and nostalgic. At critical juncture in adapting to climate change, scientists say that trees are a physical barometer and manifestation of failure and success.

In California cities, the urban canopy is a critical piece of environmental infrastructure, cooling sidewalks, cleansing air, creating wildlife habitat and giving people of all socioeconomic backgrounds respite from intensifying heat waves. In more remote places, where disease and drought have already turned vast tracts of wilderness into kindling, the fallen trees, unless they are quickly cleared, invite wildfire and pests.

In a news conference, Ms. Nemeth, the state water resources director, blamed the horticultural devastation on the drought as well as the violent weather. “We’re moving from extreme drought to extreme flood,” she said. “What that means is, a lot of our trees are stressed.”

At the same time, weather systems shifted by climate change have amplified wind and precipitation, said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center. Last weekend’s storm was very wet — essentially, an atmospheric fire hose hanging over California — but this week’s “bomb cyclone” storm brought much more wind, Dr. Mount said.

The one-two punch of ever more saturated soil and speeding winds, scientists say, has made it tougher for trees to stay upright.

“It is not a surprise when we start getting these 50- to 70-mile-per-hour gusts that these big, old trees that are stressed and have their feet planted in what is essentially mud at this point — they fall over,” Dr. Mount said. “An astonishing number of these big trees go toes up in these big storms.”

Emily Griswold, director of horticulture and teaching gardens at the University of California, Davis Arboretum, said that the swings between climate extremes have left even healthy trees more vulnerable. On New Year’s Eve, some 15 thriving trees at the arboretum uprooted — including a “beautiful, healthy” Guadalupe Island cypress planted in 1936.

She and her colleagues research which trees and plants would be best to help shade cities and which would be able to thrive in a rapidly changing California.

Much of their research so far has focused on extreme heat and drought. But the recent storms have shown that those inquiries must expand, she said.

“It’s like heat, drought, flood — hell or high water,” Ms. Griswold said. “We’re definitely looking closely at what fails, why did it fail, what can we learn from this, and how can we plant more wisely in the future?”

Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said the thousands of downed trees have been among the biggest challenges the state has encountered in managing public safety in this storm system. Falling trees not only threaten buildings and power lines, he said, but also can damage levees by toppling near waterways where branches and debris can be propelled downstream.

The new climate reality, he said, has meant that disasters intertwine and compound one another: Drought worsens and lengthens fire seasons. Global warming intensifies heat waves. Precipitation that can no longer fall as snow lands as a deluge, and flora and fauna strain to survive the ecological disruption.

The current disasters, and the living things that endure them, Mr. Ferguson said, underscore the reality that “we are one planet.”

“I’m not a scientist, just a dad with two eyes and a brain, but it’s so clear that the world is changing around us,” he said.

Holly Secon and Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed reporting.

This abundant moisture has dumped excessive amounts of rain, especially in Northern California and the central part of the state, which has led to flooding, landslides and numerous power outages.

Forecasters said that this series of storms could continue into mid-January.

Here is where forecasters believe the precipitation will fall over the next five days.

Even small amounts of additional rainfall could lead to flash flooding because the ground is saturated from previous rainfall. This weakens the soil and can lead to landslides.

But it isn’t just rain. In the higher elevations, snow has fallen by the foot, and more is on the way. The potential impacts on daily life and travel from this winter weather are shown on the map below. Drag the blue circle to see forecasts for future days.