California Storm: Biden Promises Aid to California After Mudslides and Power Outages (2024)

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Here are the latest developments.

Southern California avoided the worst predictions for flooding from the storm, which had been called potentially life threatening by forecasters. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath of Los Angeles County said that “instead, the damage has been more like 1,000 cuts — sinkholes, downed trees, areas of erosion.”

Here’s what else to know:

• President Biden promised aid during an evening news conference, after Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles stepped away to take a call from him, and then held her phone up so that Mr. Biden could address residents by speakerphone. “We’ll get any help on the way as soon as you guys request it,” the president said. “So just let me know. That’s why I’m calling.”

• Ariel Cohen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Los Angeles, warned on Monday evening that the danger had not yet passed, and even a small amount of rain could cause additional landslides. “The ground is extremely saturated — super saturated,” he said. “It’s not able to hold any additional rain before sliding.”

• Firefighters evacuated 16 people in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles, officials said, and two homes on Lockridge Road there sustained significant damage from a mudslide. The authorities also provided shelter to 100 homeless people who had been forced to evacuate a different location, officials said.

• Nearly 300,000 homes and businesses remained without power across the state late Monday, largely in Northern California, where high winds felled trees and power lines. That was down from about 850,000 customers at the peak of outages on Sunday.

• The storm fatalities in Northern California were a 41-year-old man in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael and an 82-year-old man in Yuba City, north of Sacramento, who were killed by falling trees in their backyard, and a 45-year-old man in the Santa Cruz Mountains who died when a tree fell onto his home.

President Biden, in a speakerphone call to the Los Angeles mayor, promises aid.

A few minutes later, after the fire chief, Kristin Crowley, fielded the question, Mayor Bass came back to the podium.

“I asked the president if he would give a message to Angelenos. Mr. President?” she called out, holding her phone up to the microphone.

“Yes,” he replied.

“If you could just say a word, I know Angelenos would really appreciate hearing that,” the mayor said.

“Look, first of all, I think you guys are undergoing one hell of an operation here,” Mr. Biden said, adding that he had just gotten off the phone with Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The president continued: “We’ll get any help on the way as soon as you guys request it, so just let me know. That’s why I’m calling.”

The sudden call came as Los Angeles city officials were providing an update on the record-breaking rainfall that had triggered more than 120 mudslides and damaged 25 structures, after an atmospheric river deluged wide swaths of the state.

Lindsey Horvath, a Los Angeles County supervisor, said the region avoided the sort of extreme flooding that emergency workers and rescuers had prepared for. Instead, she said during the news conference, “the damage has been more like 1,000 cuts — sinkholes, downed trees, areas of erosion.”

But Ariel Cohen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Los Angeles, noted that the danger had not yet passed, and he warned Angelenos to stay vigilant as the rain continued.

“The ground is extremely saturated — super saturated,” he said, adding, “It’s not going to take much rain for additional landslides, rockslides and mudslides to occur.”

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Biden, over speakerphone, called the city's efforts "one hell of an operation" and said he had just gotten off the phone with Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“We’ll get any help on the way as soon as you guys request it, so just let me know," the president said. "That’s why I’m calling."

“This has been a tough day for our city, a tough day for Angelenos,” said Los Angeles's mayor, Karen Bass, who said she had spent the day touring the “devastation” around the city.

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“I do think we’re lucky,” Swain said in an online briefing on Monday afternoon. “Had we experienced this rain event in a winter immediately following one of the more extreme recent Southern California wildfires seasons, I think we would be having a very different story, and we would’ve seen numerous catastrophic debris flows.”

On a street in Studio City, the hills came tumbling down.

The sound turned out to be a cascade of mud and rocks thundering down the hillside above Lockridge Road, a narrow street where Mr. Toro has lived for more than two decades. The street winds up into the base of a steep ravine. It’s the kind of hillside that officials warned would be vulnerable to mudslides during the record-breaking rainfall that fell on Sunday.

Mr. Toro looked into the darkness to see that the muck from the hillside had pushed his Honda Pilot into the Toyota Tacoma parked in the driveway in front of his home. Chunks of brick retaining walls upended by the mud had smashed into the vehicles.

Officials urged Mr. Toro and other residents of the nine homes on Lockridge Road to flee. At a news conference on Monday, Kristin M. Crowley, the Los Angeles fire chief, said firefighters had evacuated 16 people from the homes on the street and moved some of the residents to emergency shelters.

“Thankfully no one was injured during this rescue,” she said.

Mr. Toro spent a nearly sleepless night at a relative’s house. “I’m still jittery,” he said on Monday while huddling outside his home in a bucket hat and rain jacket. Fortunately, he said, the mud didn’t get into his house.

Across the street, though, city inspectors had “red tagged” his neighbors’ house, meaning it was too dangerous to occupy. Mud and rocks had exploded through their garage, leaving its contents strewed down the hill in the grime filling the mouths of storm drains.

At one point, a lone soccer ball rolled down the street.

Sean Matsumoto and Andrea Holstein, who have lived down the street from the damaged homes for 13 years, walked slowly in galoshes along a street below Lockridge. They had fled quickly with their children, and put their dog in the trunk of their car — there wasn’t time to grab possessions.

Mud had seeped into their front entryway, but the house had mostly escaped damage. Ms. Holstein’s parents, who also live in the neighborhood, were fine, she said.

They were more worried about their neighbors. Mr. Matsumoto toted a red plastic basket from CVS — he was looking for photographs and mementos that may have been swept out of their neighbors’ homes.

Soumya Karlamangla contributed reporting.

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The four people reported missing have been found and were being helped off the mountain, the authorities said.

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Staying open, Carvalho says, “was the right call.”

She added that city and county rescue crews were scouring the Los Angeles River by boat and helicopter in response to unconfirmed reports that a 6-year-old boy had been swept away.

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Heavy snow forces ski resorts to reduce operations.

While the heavy snowfall is sure to be welcome after a rainy, unusually warm December, the storm affected popular resorts across the state, from Big Bear Mountain Resort in Southern California to Palisades Tahoe in Olympic Valley.

Snow Valley, one of Big Bear’s three mountains, was closed Monday because of “heavy rains with snow at higher elevation,” according to the mountain’s website. Palisades Tahoe — where a 66-year-old man died last month after he and three other people were caught in an avalanche — closed early on Sunday because of the storm, and large amounts of snow put the mountain in a full “reset mode,” according to a message on Palisades Tahoe’s website.

“During a snowfall event, while we continuously perform avalanche mitigation as conditions allow, unmarked hazards get buried, we can lose access to some of our roads, and ramps get covered,” the message said. Eighteen inches of snow had fallen in the past 24 hours, with more expected Monday, according to the resort’s snow report.

Skiers headed to some of these resorts over the weekend said on social media that they encountered challenging driving conditions, from reduced visibility to hours of snarled traffic. While Interstate 80 and Highway 50, the two main roads to Tahoe resorts, remained open, state officials issued advisories for drivers.

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Many schools in Southern California will remain open on Monday.

Los Angeles Unified has more than 400,000 students in more than 700 schools across the district. At least one, Vinedale College Preparatory Academy in Sun Valley, will be closed because it is in a mandatory evacuation area. Those students will report to a different school, according to the district.

Several other districts in Southern California, including Long Beach and San Diego, also had not announced any plans to close as of early Monday morning. Long Beach Unified School District said on social media that it would trim trees and remove debris from roofs to “eliminate potential hazards.” It also asked parents to prioritize safety and leave more time for drop off and pickup.

Santa Monica-Malibu Unified Schools announced on Monday morning that all of its Malibu schools would be closed, but the district’s Santa Monica schools would remain open.

Santa Barbara Unified Schools, a smaller district north of Los Angeles, was also closed on Monday as a precautionary measure, officials said. “This decision prioritizes the safety and well-being of our students and staff during potentially hazardous weather conditions,” the school district said in a statement.

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Here are the latest rainfall totals for the Los Angeles area.

A lot of rain, by local standards, had already fallen by Sunday night, with some locations doubling their two-day cumulative rainfall totals between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Here are the Weather Service’s two-day cumulative rainfall totals for six locations across Los Angeles County as of 10 a.m. local time on Monday:

Los Angeles International Airport: 3.40 inches

Pasadena: 5.28 inches

Santa Barbara: 3.88 inches

Santa Monica Airport: 5.76 inches

Topanga: 10.8 inches

Ventura: 3.49 inches

Bel Air: 10.59 inches

Colbi Edmonds contributed reporting.

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Storm-battered Los Angeles faces another day of heavy rainfall.

“The major wind and power outages will be the less dangerous part of the storm, relative to what’s about to unfold, and is starting to unfold, in Southern California,” Dr. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California, Los Angeles, said during an online briefing on Sunday evening.

Already, the region has been lashed by record rainfall. Mudslides covered the canyon roads in and out of Malibu, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. And in the Studio City neighborhood, firefighters evacuated six people from homes as water dragged debris down into the area, the Los Angeles Fire Department said.

Officials urged residents to brace for more flooded streets in the valleys and mudslides in the mountains on Monday. The entire county, home to almost 10 million people, was under a flash flood warning until midnight.

As of Sunday night, more than four inches of rain had fallen on the Santa Monica Mountains, and the totals were rising at rates of more than half an inch per hour, according to Joe Sirard, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard, north of Los Angeles.

When rain falls in large quantities on the mountains, it rushes downhill — sometimes taking the saturated land with it — and collects in low-lying areas, such as the vast sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, which can leave intersections and streets under water.

Rivers and streams could swell, overtopping their banks and flooding the neighborhoods surrounding them. “Many, many hours of rain adds up,” Mr. Sirard said.

Soumya Karlamangla contributed reporting.

A blustery day leads to damage in the San Francisco Bay Area.

While communities in Northern California had been concerned about flooding before the storm hit, the fierce winds ended up causing more problems.

Towering trees fell onto highways and blocked traffic. Ferries on the San Francisco Bay were called back to shore. An outdoor dining structure in Noe Valley even slid into the middle of the road before bar patrons and neighbors ran outside and pushed it back into place.

In Marin County, winds approached 90 miles per hour on mountain tops and took down trees, power lines and structures.

Trina Baucom, 60, was less than 100 feet from the Point Reyes Lighthouse parking lot when she turned around. Rocks and sand flew across the roadway as her Jeep Wrangler swayed on a narrow road more than 200 feet above the Pacific Ocean.

“It was pretty scary up there,” she yelled over the wind and sideways rain.

On a cattle ranch just east of the lighthouse, William Nunes, 27, watched as the wind ripped a calf hutch from the ground and sent it flying into the air and over a hill.

Next went the roof to his cattle barn. Several sheets of metal as long as two cars were torn off and landed beside dozens of wet cows. The metal sheets shook violently, with the wind threatening to send them flying again, until two ranch workers secured them to the manure-covered ground while Mr. Nunes poured gravel on top to weigh them down.

In San Francisco, one of the most dramatic scenes of the storm unfolded at 18th and Market streets, a half-mile west of the Castro District. A giant pine on a city-owned hill fell in the middle of the morning, causing a small landslide that sent dirt and tree limbs tumbling into the road.

Officials closed that part of Market Street, a major thoroughfare, as they waited hours for arborists to arrive and remove the tree. Sgt. Mike Mitchell of the San Francisco Police Department, who stood with other police and traffic control officers surveying the scene, said that the city simply did not have enough arborists to maintain its urban forest.

Elsewhere in the city, tree limbs and entire trees fell, including onto a car parked near Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, and across a road near Twin Peaks. The Department of Emergency Management warned people to “avoid walking in parks and other terrain with trees.” There were no reports of injuries from falling trees.

It also was high winds, more than the rain, that prompted the last-minute cancellation of the San Francisco Half Marathon on Sunday morning, bringing disappointment to some runners and relief to others.

It wasn’t all grim. By midafternoon, in a sunny respite between storms, a huge rainbow appeared over the city.

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More than 850,000 homes and businesses are without power.

Pacific Gas & Electric, which services customers in Northern California, the Central Valley and the coast down to Santa Barbara, said that their outages alone were affecting more than a million people on Sunday evening, as strong winds and fallen trees made it impossible for crews to make a full assessment.

“Our message to customers mainly is we’re working to assess the damage,” said Denny Boyles, a PG&E spokesman.

Before the storm, the utility company had warned customers to move patio furniture inside to prevent it from flying into power lines, he said, recalling a powerful storm a few years ago in which wind gusts sent a customer’s backyard trampoline flying.

Santa Clara County was the hardest-hit part of the state when it came to electricity outages. Nearly 140,000 homes and businesses had gone dark by Sunday evening as a result of the strong winds and heavy rain, said Scott Kleebauer, a forecaster with the National Weather Service. Flooding in the county even affected PG&E’s underground equipment.

Most of California was under either a wind advisory or high wind warning, Mr. Kleebauer added, noting that the rain could also cause mudslides with the potential to knock out power lines.

Several other regions were hit by power outages, including Sacramento, where more than 170,000 customers were without power — still far fewer than the 600,000 whose electricity was knocked out during last year’s storms, said Gamaliel Ortiz, a spokesman for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.

“Last year was the measuring stick for us and we know what to prepare for,” he said, noting that the utility service had since increased the number of repair crews, damage assessors and office support staff members. But as the storm continued to clobber the state, worse impacts were certainly possible, Mr. Ortiz said.

“The possibility of the most damage is kind of right now,” he added. “We don’t know which way it’s going to go.”

What is an atmospheric river?

Atmospheric river storms get their name from their long, narrow shape and the prodigious amount of water they carry.

They form when winds over the Pacific draw a filament of moisture from the band of warm, moist air over the tropics and channel it toward the West Coast. When this ribbon of moisture hits the Sierra Nevada and other mountains, it is forced upward, cooling it and turning its water into immense quantities of rain and snow.

Climate scientists also distinguish atmospheric rivers from other kinds of storms by the amount of water vapor they carry. These amounts form the basis for a five-point scale used to rank atmospheric rivers from “weak” to “exceptional.”

As humans continue burning fossil fuels and heating the atmosphere, the warmer air can hold more moisture. This means storms in many places, California included, are more likely to be extremely wet and intense.

Scientists are also studying whether global warming might be shifting the way winds carry moisture around the atmosphere, potentially influencing the number of atmospheric rivers that sweep through California each year and how long they last. They have not yet come to firm conclusions on these questions, though.

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How is climate change affecting floods?

Floods fall somewhere along the confidence spectrum between heat waves (“yes, clearly”) and tornadoes (“we don’t know yet”), said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at University of California, Los Angeles. “I’d say, ‘yes, probably, but…’”

Flooding, like other disasters, involves a number of competing factors that may affect its frequency and intensity in opposing ways. Climate change, which is worsening extreme rainfall in many storms, is an increasingly important part of the mix.

What causes floods

Several main ingredients contribute to flood development: precipitation, snowmelt, topography and how wet the soil is. Depending on the type of the flood, some factors may matter more than others.

For example, a river flood, also known as a fluvial flood, occurs when a river, stream or lake overflows with water, often following heavy rainfall or quickly melting snow. A coastal flood occurs when land areas near the coast are inundated by water, often following a severe storm that collides with high tides.

Flooding can also happen in areas with no nearby bodies of water. Flash floods, in particular, can develop anywhere that experiences intense rainfall over a short period of time.

How floods are measured

Many metrics are used to measure floods, including stage height (the height of the water in a river relative to a specific point) and flow rate (how much water passes by a specific location over a particular time period).

To describe the severity of a flood, though, experts will often use the more simple term “a 100-year flood,” to describe a flood that has a 1 percent chance of striking in any given year, considered an extreme and rare occurrence. The term is just a description of likelihood, though, not a promise. A region can have two 100-year floods within a few years.

Have floods increased in past decades?

Not exactly. Climate change has undoubtedly intensified heavy precipitation events, but, unexpectedly, there has been no corresponding increase in flood events.

When it comes to river floods, climate change is likely exacerbating the frequency and intensity of the extreme flood events, but decreasing the number of moderate floods, researchers found in a 2021 study published in Nature.

As the climate warms, higher rates of evaporation cause soils to dry out more rapidly. For those moderate and more commonplace floods, the initial conditions of soil moisture is important, since drier soils may be able to absorb most of the rainfall.

With larger flood events, that initial soil moisture matters less “because there’s so much water that the soil wouldn’t be able to absorb all of it, anyway,” said Manuela Brunner, a hydrologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany and the lead author of the 2021 study. Any additional water added past the point where the soil is fully saturated will run off and contribute to flood development, Dr. Brunner said.

Looking to the future

Scientists are confident some types of flooding will increase in the “business as usual” scenario where humans continue warming the planet with greenhouse gas emissions at the current rate.

First, coastal flooding will continue to increase as sea levels rise. Melting glaciers and ice sheets add volume to the ocean, and the water itself expands as it warms.

Second, flash flooding will continue to increase as there are more extreme precipitation events. Warmer temperatures increase evaporation, putting more moisture into the atmosphere that then gets released as rain or snowfall.

Researchers also expect that, as the climate warms, flash floods will get “flashier,” meaning that the timing of the floods will get shorter while the magnitude gets higher. Flashier floods can be more dangerous and destructive.

Flash floods may also increasingly follow catastrophic wildfires in a deadly cascade of climate disasters. That’s because wildfires destroy forests and other vegetation, which in turn weakens the soil and makes it less permeable.

If heavy rains occur on land damaged by a fire, the water “does not get absorbed by the land surface as effectively as it once did,” said Andrew Hoell, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Physical Sciences Lab.

Though it may be counterintuitive to see the two extremes, too much fire and too much water, in the same region, the sight will most likely become more common, particularly in the American West.

Are different areas experiencing flooding?

In a recent paper published in Nature, researchers found that in the future, flash floods may be more common father north, in Northern Rockies and Northern Plains states.

This poses a risk for flood mitigation efforts, as local governments may not be aware of the future flash flood risk, said Zhi Li, lead author of the 2022 study.

The pattern is driven by more rapidly melting snow, and snow that melts earlier in the year, Dr. Li said. Regions at higher latitudes may experience more “rain-on-snow” floods like those that surged through Yellowstone in June.