Soaked California Braces for Another Deluge as Storm Batters State

A powerful storm with hurricane-force gusts is winding down after ripping across California, leaving behind power outages, flood threats and road closures just hours before another drenching is set to wash over the state.

“It’s not like this is done,” Bob Oravec, senior branch forecaster at the US Weather Prediction Center, said in an interview. “The rain reloads in Northern California tomorrow. Then there’s a big rain event Monday and Tuesday.”

The latest storm brought wind gusts of 132 miles (212 kilometers) per hour to Alpine Meadows, California in the mountains west of Lake Tahoe and triggered some evacuations in Contra Costa and Santa Cruz counties, outside San Francisco.

“The system has reached peak intensity and it is slowly weakening today,” Oravec said.

The aftermath left more than 150,000 homes and businesses in California without power as of 10:19 am local time, according to poweroutage.us. Highway 1 on the scenic Big Sur coast remains closed in several spots because of downed trees and flooding, according to the state’s transportation department.

A child was killed in Sonoma County when a tree fell on a house, according to the Associated Press. In Fairfield, a 19-year-old woman was killed after losing control of her vehicle on a partially flooded road and crashing.

While drought-stricken California desperately needs rain and snow, the last two weeks have brought a series of storms that unleashed more water than some areas can handle. The storms are refilling depleted reservoirs and boosting the state’s mountain snowpack, but they’re also causing chaos on roads, raising risks from flooding and mudslides and endangering lives.

Flooding has already caused some problems across the state. Levees on northern California’s Cosumnes River have failed, leading to a temporary closure of Highway 99, said Brad Moore of the California Nevada River Forecast Center. The weir system on the Sacramento River has sprung into action, sending water into bypass areas.

The current round of storms is “very much to the higher end” of what California sees in winter, Moore said.

Long-range forecast models show there won’t be much of a change to larger weather patterns until the end of January, which in addition to bringing storms to the West Coast will keep most of the US relatively mild.

More than 5 inches of rain could fall across a large part of California in the coming week and some areas could see more than 10 inches, according to the Weather Prediction Center.

Hydrologists are concerned about next weeks’ forecast for another incoming system, according to Moore.

“There is one that is roughly about one week out that is looking quite significant,” Moore said. “It remains to be seen if it materializes.”

Top photo: Workers build a flood protection barrier at the entrance to a business in the Mission District of San Francisco, on Jan. 3.