LOS ANGELES (AP) – Jesus Barron responded to his wife's panicked phone call warning her of a landslide in the bedroom of their home in the hills of eastern Los Angeles County. After that, the line was disconnected.
“She called me and said the mountain was coming down,” he recalled Wednesday. “I thought the worst.”
Wendy Barron fled her Hacienda Heights home in Southern California during Tuesday's historic downpour as mud washed down the hillside and destroyed two fences she built when her family moved seven years ago. It broke through the wall and caused severe damage to the house.
“Of course, just stopping Mother Nature is not enough,” Jesus Baron said.
Arashi accelerates further in second consecutive game atmospheric river It is expected to make landfall in California in the next few days, making landfall in the northern part of the state last weekend, then moving down the coast and stopping in the southern part for several days, turning roads into rivers. hundreds of landslides and killed at least nine people.Threw away 1 foot or more As much as 30 centimeters of rain fell in some places, one of the wettest periods It remains in the records of Southern California.
The damage to the Barrons' home was too severe to make it uninhabitable for the next few months, but the couple was able to recover some of their belongings. Next, you need to decide whether to return it after repair.
“We love it here,” Jesus Barron said. “But it won’t be easy to go through this again.”
The final downpour was expected late Wednesday, with clear skies expected to remain in most parts of the state by the end of the week. But even after the rains, authorities warned that the risk of the hillside collapsing remained. Experts say it won't be long before more water, mud and rocks wash down the fragile hillsides after a week of rain and snow. There have already been at least 520 landslides in Los Angeles alone.
The system dumped heavy rain and mountain snow on San Diego County overnight before turning into scattered showers. Winter storm warnings and advisories remained in place for the mountains of Southern California and the Sierra Nevada to the north.
Jill Shinefield has lived in the Beverly Crest area of the Santa Monica Mountains for 23 years. She watched as her neighbors were evacuated and other homes damaged by mudslides this week. She decided to stay here because her house is not facing the side of a hill.
“We've always been concerned about fires, but we've never really thought about landslides,” she says.
About 430 trees have fallen in Los Angeles alone, according to the city, and workers are struggling to deal with the storm's aftermath.
A well-established tree helped protect a home in the Studio City neighborhood Sunday night. When a landslide hit Scott Toro's neighborhood, a carob tree and mud pushed his SUV out of its parking space, preventing debris from hitting his home.
“The mud came down the hill and stopped three feet short of the front door,” Toro recalled Wednesday as he cleaned his yard. “It sounded like a helicopter crashing or a freight train going by.”
Wednesday's outages were significantly down from peak levels, but more than 71,000 customers remained without power, mostly in the northern and central parts of the state, according to Poweroutage.us.
People were urged not to touch collapsed railway lines and avoid roads that were at risk of flooding or mud. At least 50 motorists stranded in Los Angeles during the storm were rescued from rushing water in swollen streams, rivers, roads and storm channels, fire officials said.
Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the Governor's Office of Emergency Services, said four of the nine people who died in the storm were hit by falling trees or limbs. Another person died after losing oxygen during a power outage, one drowned in the Tijuana River near the U.S.-Mexico border and three died in car crashes, he said.
Atmospheric rivers hit the state last year as well. At least 20 people killed.
This winter's heavy rains have been a silver lining in that they have helped boost the state's often-strained water supplies. Water content in the critical Sierra Nevada snowpack has jumped from 52% on Jan. 30 to 73% of its current average, according to data from the state Department of Water Resources. When this snowpack melts, it provides about 30% of California's water.
In Los Angeles alone, at least 7 billion gallons (26.5 billion liters) of rainwater have been captured for groundwater and local supplies, according to the mayor's office. Just two years ago, nearly all of California was hit by a devastating drought that strained resources and forced water cuts.
Warnings were in effect across the Arizona border as the recent weather front moved east, and northern areas extending southeast toward New Mexico were under a winter storm warning until Wednesday at 5 p.m. . A large swath of central Arizona, including Phoenix, was placed under a flood watch until Thursday morning.
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Associated Press writers Christopher Webber and John Antczak in Los Angeles, Julie Watson in San Diego, Walter Berry in Phoenix and Scott Sonner in Reno, Nevada, contributed.
