A powerful storm continued to threaten California on Tuesday after causing dangerous flooding with biting winds, killing at least three people and leaving nearly half a million homes without power.
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Rain falls in the south of the Golden State, where it has been raining continuously for more than 24 hours. In the north, where the gusts were very strong, at least three people were killed by falling trees on Sunday, according to local authorities.
“This is a severe storm with dangerous consequences that have the potential to endanger lives,” California Governor Gavin Newsom warned, declaring a state of emergency in eight of the state’s 58 counties.
The southern towns of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Santa Barbara are particularly affected.
Authorities are increasingly urging caution as the rain is expected to continue until Tuesday or even Wednesday. It falls on soil that was already saturated by a first storm last week, which increases the risk of flooding because the earth no longer absorbs anything.
“There remains a high risk of severe flooding, debris flows and landslides in the greater Los Angeles area and areas approximately 50 miles (editor's note) further east and west for at least the next 24 hours,” said Daniel Swain, an extreme weather specialist Weather phenomena at the University of California, Los Angeles, warned on Monday.
Like the rest of the region, the city of Los Angeles experiences flooding that can cause certain streets or intersections to shut down, as well as dangerous landslides. This particularly led authorities to issue evacuation orders for the Hollywood and Santa Monica hills that overlook the metropolis.
In this affluent area, mudslides literally buried cars and tore a home off its foundation, according to images from local station KTLA.
“It echoed like a clap of thunder,” Dave Christensen, a local resident, told this station.
“When I went out to see what had happened, I saw a water heater where the house was and sure enough the house had slid down the slope into the street,” he said. -He specifies.
For Los Angeles, “yesterday was the 10th wettest day since we began tracking precipitation in 1877,” Mayor Karen Bass said at a news conference Monday.
“Now more than ever it is important to stay safe and stay off the roads. “Don’t leave your home unless absolutely necessary,” she stressed.
According to the specialist website PowerOutage.us, more than 300,000 households and businesses remained cut off from electricity as of Monday afternoon. The north of the state is particularly affected, where wind speeds of more than 160 km/h were recorded in the San Francisco area on Sunday.
On Monday, dozens of flights departing and arriving at Los Angeles Airport were canceled or delayed.
Like the previous storm, this one is due to an “atmospheric river”: a gigantic rain corridor that converts water vapor stored in the tropics around Hawaii. In California, this particular phenomenon is nicknamed the “Pineapple Express.”
The West Coast of the United States experienced an unusually wet winter last year due to a series of closely spaced storms that brought near-record rainfall.
These disasters claimed more than twenty lives and caused extensive damage and power outages. But they allowed California to replenish some of its water reserves after several years of intense drought.
Historically, it has been common in California to alternate between hot spells and heavy rains, and it is always difficult to link a specific weather event to climate change.
However, scientists have been warning for years that global warming is disrupting the climate and increasing the frequency of extreme events, be they storms or heat waves.