Storm-weary Californians clean up, prepare for another flood

Laurie Morse bagged wet sand in heavy rain Wednesday, preparing to stack them along her garage in a last-ditch effort to hold off a rising creek on California’s Central Coast as the storm-ravaged state braced for another round of heavy rains and harmful winds.

The Morse roof was leaking, and along with her neighbors near Santa Cruz, she spent every day of 2023 trying to figure out how to keep her house dry after an unrelenting onslaught of severe weather had taken a toll in the past two weeks. Cars were flooded, trees were uprooted and roofs of houses were blown off.

While rain has eased in many areas, thunderstorms have brought another atmospheric river into the northern half of the state, with forecasters saying the latest system will be followed by more storms this weekend and next week. From the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles, Californians have had little time to rest between assessing damage from the latest storm and preparing for the next.

Earlier this week, Morse and her fellow citizens of tiny Rio del Mar were ordered to evacuate as hillsides collapsed and massive logs and stumps rained down the swollen Aptos Creek from the Santa Cruz Mountains into Monterey Bay.

Now they were trying to get out, while stacking sandbags and hoping for the best as the rain intensified.

“Now it’s one step forward and two steps back,” said Morse, 59, a disabled Army veteran. “So much damage already.”

A plume of moisture lurking off the northern coast stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii, turning the atmospheric river into a “veritable pineapple express,” according to the National Weather Service.

Michael Anderson, a climate scientist with the Department of Water Resources, said California has had seven storms since late December and expected two more, slightly weaker ones, before the state gets a reprieve by the end of next week.

“The problem is that these are the eighth and ninth storms in the sequence, and the cumulative effect is likely to cause more severe effects than the storms themselves could have caused,” Anderson said.

At least 18 people died as a result of the storm that hit the state. That figure is likely to rise, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday while visiting the picturesque town of Capitola, just off the Santa Cruz coast of Rio del Mar, which has been hit hard by flooding in the creek. Raging surf destroyed the legendary pier.

A 43-year-old woman was found dead Wednesday in her flooded car, a day after she called 911 to report the car was stuck in flood waters north of San Francisco, according to the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office. When the search resumed at dawn, divers found the vehicle about 10 feet (3 meters) deep on a rural road near Forestville, the department said.

More than half of California’s 58 counties have been declared disaster areas, and the damage could cost more than $1 billion to repair, according to Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the state’s Office of Emergency Management.

Crews worked to reopen major highways that had been closed by rockfalls, floods or mud-swept, while over 10,000 people who had been ordered to leave seaside towns on the central coast were allowed to return home.

This included Montecito, an affluent Santa Barbara County community home to Prince Harry and other celebrities, where a landslide killed 23 people five years ago and destroyed more than 100 homes.

This week’s storm brought back heartbreaking memories for Montecito resident Susanna Toby, who was rescued when a 2018 landslide hit her neighborhood.

Like five years ago, when the community was asked to evacuate on Monday, the only exit highway was closed, she said. “It was terrible,” she said of the latest storm. “I don’t think I slept all night and it was raining… you just can’t imagine. It’s like living in a waterfall.” But even with another storm brewing, Toby said she plans to stay put again.

She said the community has made improvements that she hopes will prevent a similar tragedy, including adding steel nets to catch falling boulders and debris pools to catch flooding before it hits the hillsides that plunge into the Pacific Ocean.

“You have to be brave to live in California,” she said, adding, “I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

High in the Eastern Sierra, California, California Department of Transportation snowplows have been working around the clock to fully open US 395, which was once blocked by 75 miles (121 km) of snow, ice and rocks. Palisades Tahoe Ski Resort said it received 300 inches (7.6 meters) of snow this season.

Despite the rainfall, much of the state remained in severe to severe drought, according to the US Drought Monitor.

Landslides damaged several homes in high-priced hillside areas of Los Angeles, and further down the coast, a sinkhole damaged 15 homes in rural Orcutt.

Kevin Costner, who won the award for Best Actor in a Television Drama Series Yellowstone, was unable to attend the Golden Globe Awards on Tuesday in Los Angeles due to the weather. Host Regina Hall revealed she sheltered in place in Santa Barbara due to flooding.

In San Francisco, a tree fell on a commuter bus on Tuesday without causing injury, while lightning struck the city’s iconic Transamerica Pyramid building without damage. In South San Francisco, strong winds also tore off part of the roof of a large apartment building.

Chainsaw crews worked around the clock to remove any fallen trees in the bay area. Arborist Remy Hammer said he expected many more trees to fall as the rains resumed.

“The soil is basically like a sponge and at some point it can no longer hold water and the trees become practically floating in the soil and very loose. And then you get combinations of strong winds, and then you get tree failures, which means whole trees are uprooted and fall down,” he said.

Weber reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press reporters John Antczak in Los Angeles; Janie Har, Olga R. Rodriguez and Haven Daly in South San Francisco; Ty O’Neill in Montecito; and Julie Watson of San Diego contributed to this report.