Latest reports suggest that rounds of heavy rain, wind and snow are battering California once again, prompting flood alerts and power outages in several regions.
According to the National Weather Service said. the storms are expected to continue at least through the weekend.
President Joe Biden since has declared the storms a major disaster and ordered federal aid to supplement local recovery efforts in affected areas.
Since last month, a series of atmospheric rivers have pummeled the state. Since then, at least 19 people have died in storm-related incidents and a 5-year-old who was swept away by floodwaters in San Luis Obispo County remains missing.
Recent weather events have resulted in more deaths than the state’s last two years of wildfires and more than 24,000 customers were without electricity on Saturday evening, according to poweroutage.us, having dropped from more than twice that number since Saturday morning.
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Flood warnings were issued across the Bay Area and Central Valley, including in Mendocino, Napa, Marin, Sonoma, Sacramento, Merced and Fresno counties.
Also, evacuations were ordered in Monterey County on the central coast, where the Salinas River’s overtopped banks inundated farmland. To the east, Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the hart-hit Merced County on Saturday, joined by local officials.
“The reality is that this is just the eighth of what we anticipate will be nine atmospheric rivers — we’re not done,” Newsom was quoted as saying at a news conference.
Merced Mayor Matthew Serratto said 5,000 homes were under evacuation orders in the area, which he says is experiencing record flooding. A flood warning was also issued for Santa Cruz County.
Rising flood waters from the San Lorenzo River on Saturday morning forced residents to evacuate their small low-lying communities of Felton Grove and Soquel Village. The state will continue to see periodic rain into Wednesday, with 2-4 inches expected to drop along the Sierra Nevada Mountain range, according to the Weather Prediction Center.
“The end is in sight,” for this round of storms, said meteorologist David Roth.
Story was adapted from NPR.
