California grapples with cleanup, fallout from deadly storms

Laurie Morse shovelled wet sand into bags in the pouring rain Wednesday, preparing to stack them along her garage in a last-ditch effort to keep out a rising creek on California’s central coast, as the storm-ravaged state braced for another round of lashing rains and damaging winds.

Morse’s roof was leaking, and along with her neighbours near Santa Cruz, she’s spent every day of 2023 trying to figure out how to keep her house dry after an unrelenting onslaught of violent weather caused widespread damage over the past two weeks. Cars were submerged, trees uprooted and roofs blown off homes.

While the rain eased in many areas, thunderstorms led yet another atmospheric river into the northern half of the state and forecasters said the latest system would be followed by more storms this weekend and next week. From the San Francisco Bay Area down to Los Angeles, Californians had little time to rest between assessing damage from the last storm and preparing for the next.

Earlier this week, Morse and her fellow residents of tiny Rio Del Mar were ordered to evacuate as hillsides collapsed and massive logs and stumps tumbled down the bloated Aptos Creek from the Santa Cruz mountains into the Monterey Bay.

Now they were scrambling to clean up while simultaneously stacking sandbags and hoping for the best as the rain got heavier.

“It’s one step forward and two steps back right now,” said Morse, 59, a disabled Army veteran. “There’s so much damage already.”

The plume of moisture lurking off the coast stretched all the way over the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii, making it “a true Pineapple Express,” the U.S. National Weather Service said.

State hit by 7 recent storms

Michael Anderson, climatologist with the state’s Department of Water Resources, said California has been hit by seven storms since the end of December and two more slightly weaker ones were expected before the state gets a reprieve by the end of next week.

“The challenge is they’re storms eight and nine in the sequence and the cumulative effect is likely to cause impacts larger than the storms themselves might cause,” Anderson said.

At least 18 people have died in the storms battering the state. The figure is likely to rise, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday during…