RESCUE WORK
Heavy rain began lashing Southern California Wednesday, where some communities had already seen 25.4cm of rain in the first storm, forecasters said.
At least three people died in storm-related incidents, including a man killed by a falling tree, the Los Angeles Times reported.
In San Bernardino County, adjacent to Los Angeles, authorities told AFP they were working to divert the flow of floodwater on Thursday.
Muddy water streamed through the mountain town of Wrightwood a day earlier, trapping people in their homes, said Christopher Prater, spokesperson for the county fire department.
“Fire department personnel were out there rescuing people, assisting them from their houses, getting them to safety, also while affecting rescues from people that were stranded in their vehicles,” he said Thursday, with work going on into the night.
Fire-burn scar zones, which are less able to absorb water due to vegetation being stripped from them, were under special alert – including the coastal areas of Pacific Palisades and Malibu, both still recovering from devastating wildfires in January.
In northern California, a dangerous storm was tracked developing early Thursday morning in the San Francisco Bay Area, with an emergency alert for flash flooding issued, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Soon after noon on Thursday, the NWS office in San Francisco warned that a severe thunderstorm near Santa Cruz could spawn a tornado.
The service was also predicting that a winter storm could bring heavy snowfall to the Sierra Nevada Mountains along California’s eastern border.