Californians are bracing as a second atmospheric river storm hits the Golden State in one week, this time bringing even more dangerous flooding, hurricane-force winds and potentially causing mudslides and landslides from Sunday through Tuesday.
Los Angeles could see up to six inches of rainfall as the atmospheric river moves through the ... [+]
In northern and central California, the National Weather Service issued a hurricane-force wind warning—the first time the region is expected to see wind speeds higher than 90 miles per hour since the agency began keeping records.
Los Angeles County is expected to see the worst rainfall, with the NWS predicting up to 6 inches of rain in the valleys and up to 12 inches on mountaintops and foothills.
Evacuation orders have been issued for parts of Ventura County near Ojai on Saturday in preparation, while local officials in Los Angeles declared an evacuation for the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Shadow Hills on Sunday morning.
San Jose, the third largest city in the state, issued mandatory evacuations for communities alongside the city’s rivers early on Sunday morning, including a community of homeless people living on the banks of the Guadalupe River.
As of 9:30 a.m. local time, about 107,000 customers have already lost power, according to online tracker Poweroutage.us, with most of the outages so far occurring along the northern California coast, according to PG&E.
7 inches. That’s how much rainfall the low-lying coastal city of Long Beach could see on Sunday through Tuesday, Mayor Rex Richardson said at a press conference on Saturday. “That’s more than we usually get in a year—so it’s a lot of rain,” Richardson said. The city is still recovering from the rainfall from last week’s atmospheric river, which trapped cars in flood water on the Pacific Coast Highway and caused a mudslide in Rancho Palos Verde.
California and the Pacific Northwest are vulnerable to atmospheric rivers. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calls these storms “long, narrow regions in the atmosphere” that carry large amounts of water vapor through the sky, similar to how rivers carry large amounts of water on land. According to NOAA, these storms are capable of dumping nearly 15 times the amount of water than the mouth of the Mississippi River. Forecasters are identifying the storm threatening the Golden State as a “Pineapple Express”—a dangerous variant of atmospheric rivers that typically strike the coast of California. These storms carry warm tropical water vapor from Hawaii across the Pacific to the west coast of the U.S. and Canada, according to the NOAA.