California storm kills two, levee breaks

(Pajaro) The new storm that has hit California has caused impressive flooding which notably broke a dike on the Pajaro River on Saturday, after killing two people and forcing thousands of people to evacuate.

“We were hoping to avoid it, but the worst case scenario happened with the Pajaro River overflowing and the levee breaking around midnight (Friday-Saturday night),” Luis Alejo, a Monterey County official, tweeted Saturday. located on the coast, in central California.

The California National Guard’s Twitter account showed images of rescues of residents in their cars, trapped by the impressive floods.

At least one road was also literally washed out Friday in a small community in Santa Cruz County, just north of Monterey County.

On Friday, the director of emergency services for the governor of California, Nancy Ward, announced that the storm had “unfortunately […] two deaths.

These floods were caused by yet another storm that swept through California, already the victim of a particularly rainy winter in recent weeks.

Up to 23 centimeters of precipitation were expected in places.

This rain, coming from a rather warm depression, was likely to melt part of the exceptional snowpack accumulated over the past three months. Enough to cause runoff that is impossible to contain for the waterways of this state in the west of the country.

US President Joe Biden on Friday approved a declaration of a state of emergency in California, to facilitate assistance from the federal state.

Many evacuation orders had been issued, particularly in northern California, also affected.

This storm is fed, like most of the others this winter, by an “atmospheric river”, a gigantic corridor of rain that carries water vapor stored in the tropics, often around Hawaii, which earned them the nickname of “Pineapple Express”.

In January, a series of storms caused multiple floods, landslides and falling trees, killing 20 people.