California, hit by an “incessant parade of cyclones” according to the meteorological services, will experience new deluges on Thursday, after floods and landslides which have already killed at least 18 people.
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The forecast bad weather will head for the northern part of this western American state, the National Weather Service (NHS) has warned. Other states on the Pacific Northwest coast are expected to be affected early Saturday, he added afterwards.
“The heaviest rains are expected to impact Northwestern California for the next two days,” with precipitation up to a few centimeters, according to the NHS.
The torrential rains of the previous days on soils already saturated with water generated vast power cuts, numerous floods, uprooted many trees and cut off major roads, the floods sometimes carrying motorists.
In places, levels of precipitation not reached for 150 years have been recorded.
Part of northern California was placed under flood alerts or winter weather warnings on Wednesday.
In Aptos, a small town just over an hour’s drive south of San Francisco, residents were trying to recover from the floods of the past few days.
“It’s probably the worst flooding I’ve seen since I moved here in 1984,” Doug Spinelli told AFP.
The city’s stream “flowed so violently (…) there were tree trunks that broke into the river, almost one every thirty seconds”, said this resident. “It was incredible to see the amount of debris and wood carried by the torrent.”
More than 35,000 homes and businesses were without power early Thursday, according to the specialized site PowerOutage.us.
California Governor Gavin Newsom warned of less powerful but equally dangerous storms to come.
“This place is soaked. And now, a more modest amount of precipitation can have a greater impact in terms of conditions on the ground,” he warned, stressing that the forecast calls for the continuation of bad weather at least until January 18.
According to its services, the storms of the past few weeks have caused at least 18 deaths, “more than the forest fires of the past two years”.
In Paso Robles, in the center of the state, a five-year-old child remained missing after being washed away by the waves on Monday while his mother, who survived, drove him to school.
Research is still ongoing and “we will continue (…) until we find it,” assured Tony Cipolla, a spokesman for the services of the county sheriff of San Luis Obispo, to local media.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the deadly toll of recent storms includes motorists trapped by flooding in their cars, residents crushed by falling trees, a couple killed by a landslide and bodies washed away by the waves.
California is currently undergoing “an endless onslaught of atmospheric rivers”, unseen since 2005, according to the weather services. Rarely do these “rivers of the sky”, which form with water vapor from the tropics and travel to pour down cloudbursts onto the west coast of the United States, occur.
While it is difficult to establish a direct link between these series of storms and climate change, scientists regularly explain that warming increases the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
Last week’s storm had already knocked out power to tens of thousands of people, caused heavy flooding and triggered landslides. It had come just days after another deluge of rain on New Year’s Eve.
However, they will not be enough to replenish the water reserves in California. Several winters of above-normal rainfall would be needed to compensate for the drought of recent years, experts say.