- Joe Biden pledged immediate federal help in response.
- This is the state’s tenth “atmospheric river” this winter.
- Nearly all of California’s 39 million citizens were under some kind of weather alert.
Torrential rain has caused flash flooding and landslides in California, blocking roads, falling trees, and prompting avalanche worries in the state’s latest winter storm.
President Joe Biden pledged immediate federal help in response to the “Pineapple Express” atmospheric surge.
The National Weather Service (NWS) has issued a high danger of heavy rain over the weekend.
This is the state’s tenth “atmospheric river” this winter.
When water evaporates into the air and is blown along by the wind, it forms lengthy currents that run in the sky as rivers do on the ground. They can cause heavy rain and mountain snow.
This system, which began on Thursday, is known as a “Pineapple Express” because it transports warm subtropical moisture from near Hawaii across the Pacific.
“Lives and property are in great danger,” claimed the NWS. “Areas that do not ordinarily experience flash flooding will flood.”
As of Friday, nearly all of California’s 39 million citizens were under some kind of weather alert.
The strongest rain is forecast to fall in central California, while “copious volumes of heavy snow” are expected to make traffic problematic in sections of northern California and the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where mudslides and rockslides are also probable.
As much as 10in of rain in 24 hours could fall in some parts of the state where there is snowpack, meaning the “potential for widespread flooding is considerable”, the NWS said.
It advised California citizens to avoid obstructed and flooded roadways.
Avalanche threat in the Sierra Nevada Mountains has increased to four out of five as rain falls on more than ten feet of snow in some areas.
“Widespread avalanche activity is expected to occur with heavy loading of the snowpack from rain and high-intensity snowfall,” the Sierra Avalanche Center said in its Friday backcountry avalanche forecast.
California is still hurting after a slew of severe weather events that occurred this month and last. California Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency in 34 counties amid one of the state’s wettest winters on record.
According to the state’s head of emergency services, about 10,000 California residents were ordered to evacuate on Friday evening.
According to the website PowerOutage.us, about 50,000 households and businesses have lost power.
At least eight deaths were being investigated as possibly weather-related, with two deaths proven linked to the storms.
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