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  • The second of back-to-back atmospheric rivers battered California Sunday 
  • California is bracing for what could be days of heavy rains, flooding on roads and knocking out power to nearly 800,000 people 
  • The storm prompted the first-ever warning for hurricane-force winds in the state’s history 

The second of back-to-back atmospheric rivers battered California on Sunday, prompting the first-ever warning for hurricane-force winds in the state’s history.

California is bracing for what could be days of heavy rains, flooding on roads and knocking out power to nearly 800,000 people, with 97 percent of the state’s population under flood warning.

The current ‘bomb cyclone’ – a term denoting a storm that rapidly intensifies over 24 hours – could dump more than 8 trillion gallons of precipitation on the state.

The storm inundated streets and brought down trees and electrical lines across the San Francisco Bay Area, where winds topped 60 mph in some areas, blowing what looked like a white flag of tarpaulin off a building. Gusts exceeding 80 mph were recorded in the mountains.

A video out of Los Angeles caught chilling images of planes flying into the city as they tried to navigate the terrible conditions.

The storm inundated streets and brought down trees and electrical lines across the San Francisco Bay Area, where winds topped 60 mph in some areas, blowing what looked like a white flag of tarpaulin off a building. Gusts exceeding 80 mph were recorded in the mountains.

A video out of Los Angeles caught chilling images of planes flying into the city as they tried to navigate the terrible conditions.

In Southern California, officials warned of potentially devastating flooding and ordered evacuations for canyons that burned in recent wildfires that are at high risk for mud and debris flows.

The National Weather Service office for Los Angeles warned that ‘all systems are go for one of the most dramatic weather days in recent memory.’

One Home Depot in Santa Barbara, which saw some of the worst of the chaos in videos posted online, sold out on sandbags and was instead offering customers potting soil and fertilizer.

 

 

 

 

 

‘This storm is predicted to be one of the largest and most significant in our county´s history, and our goal is to get through it without any fatalities or any serious injuries,’ Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown told reporters Saturday.

Classes were canceled Monday for schools across the county, which was devastated by mudslides caused by powerful storms in 2018.

Strong winds and heavy rain brought treacherous conditions to the coastal city of Ventura, west of Los Angeles.

More than 850,000 customers were without electricity statewide by Sunday evening, with most of the outages concentrated in coastal regions, according to poweroutage.us.

Six San Francisco Bay Area counties were at low risk of waterspouts coming ashore and becoming tornadoes, said the Storm Prediction Center.

Winds caused hours-long delays at San Francisco International Airport. By 2:30 p.m. Sunday, 155 departing flights were delayed and 69 had been canceled, according to the tracking website FlightAware.

The visibly bad weather didn’t stop droves of San Francisco 49ers fans from braving the storm to send their team off to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas Sunday.

Palisades Tahoe, a ski resort about 200 miles northeast of San Francisco, said it was anticipating the heaviest snowfall yet this season, with accumulations of 6 inches per hour for a total of up to two feet.

Heavy snow was expected into Monday throughout the Sierra Nevada and motorists were urged to avoid mountain roads.

Much of the state had been drying out from the system that blew in last week, causing flooding and dumping welcome snow in the mountains.

The latest storm, also called a ‘Pineapple Express’ because its plume of moisture stretches back across the Pacific to near Hawaii, arrived offshore in Northern California on Saturday, when most of the state was under some sort of wind, surf or flood watch.

The weather service on Sunday issued a rare ‘hurricane force wind warning’ for the Central Coast, with wind gusts of up to 92 mph possible from the Monterey Peninsula to the northern section of San Luis Obispo County.


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