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California braces for powerful atmospheric rivers

Still reeling from last year’s onslaught of wind and rain, communities along the California coast are bracing for a one-two punch of hefty storms that are forecast to begin Wednesday and last through to early next week.

Federal, county and municipal officials have taken to social media to warn residents of the potential for flooding and power outages, while Gov. Gavin Newsom activated California’s Emergency Operations Center Tuesday afternoon.

Fire crews, swift water rescue teams and other first responders have been moving into place throughout the state in preparation of the storms, said Brian Ferguson, spokesman for the state’s Office of Emergency Operations Services.

“The state is working around the clock with our local partners to deploy life-saving equipment and resources statewide,” Newsom said. “With more storms on the horizon, we’ll continue to mobilize every available resource to protect Californians.”

Ferguson said the first storm was expected to wallop the northern part of the state beginning Wednesday. The second one, which is forecast to arrive a few days later, is anticipated to strike further south, potentially wreaking havoc in Southern California.

“The first one is windy and colder,” Ferguson said. Gusts could top 60-70 mph and officials urged people to brace for widespread power outages. Officials were predicting anywhere from 6 to 8 inches of rain in some areas of the Santa Cruz Mountains — with the potential for downpours of 2 inches per hour.

State officials are already working with utilities to get crews dispatched quickly when power goes down, Ferguson said.

The second storm system is “the one we’re more concerned about,” he said. It is warmer — allowing it to pack more water — and is expected to hit with particular ferocity in Southern California. Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Diego could be in for massive amounts of rain. The mountains east of Los Angeles could face heavy snow.

Ferguson added that the flooding that devastated communities such as Pajaro and Planada in last winter’s atmospheric rivers was less of a concern this time around. Many of the levees that crisscross the state are aging, privately maintained and something of an unknown to officials.

“That is always a challenge,” he said. “We don’t know which levees have ground squirrels in them, which farmer put a pipe [in somewhere]. Unknowns are the things that are hardest to solve for.”

He added that officials are also confronting “tons of misinformation and bad information” about the weather on social media. Contrary to one rumor flying around cyberspace, this is not an ARkStorm, he said

While meteorologists cannot specifically predict total rainfall, wind speed and degree of flooding, emergency responders say they have a general sense of where things can go wrong and will be on the lookout for those inevitable, but unanticipated emergencies that happen with any major weather event.

“We are watching these incoming storms closely,” said Brian Garcia, with the National Weather Service.

With soils saturated and high winds expected, trees are likely to come down, he said. Such incidents will cause “ingress/egress issues for some communities” and potentially gum up or dam rivers with debris.

“These are items we cannot forecast, but can alert our partnering agencies and the public,” he said.

Jim Shivers, a spokesman for CalTrans District 5 — which covers the Central Coast — said they’re keeping an eye on Paul’s Slide, a two-mile stretch of Highway 1 south of Big Sur that was knocked out by a landslide last year. It’s been closed ever since and remains under repair.

Worker safety is the biggest concern, he said, and the agency will pull all construction workers from the site until the storm has passed. They’ll then wait a couple of days until they have drier conditions, and only then bring them back.

Asked if the site is more vulnerable to slides and damage because it’s under repair, Shivers said that in some places, recent drainage work may have actually made the site safer. But, as with anything along the eroding Pacific coastline, nothing is considered 100% stable.

In Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, officials said that while there are no signs these storms will cause flooding in the Pajaro River — where a levee breached last year, flooding the community of Pajaro — officials will monitor the systems, river and levees closely.

Mark Strudley, executive director at Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency, said the 400-foot area that breached last year “and caused all the grief … was repaired using modern engineering standards [and] is actually better built than the older levees to either side of it.”

Because of that and “a bunch of other work that the counties did in preparation for this winter, we are going into this winter in a better position than we went in last year,” he said. However, despite those efforts, “it is still an old, decrepit levee system. So you can make your best efforts, but if Mother Nature gets too angry at us, you know … they’re still vulnerable.”

Unlike last year, when officials across the region initially brushed off concerns about incoming storms, everyone is on high alert and urging residents to be cautious.

“We started sending messaging to likely impacted neighborhoods last night and are resupplying sand for sandbags throughout the county,” said Jason Hoppin, a spokesman for Santa Cruz County.

“If you have experienced flooding on your property in the past, we urge you to TAKE PROTECTIVE MEASURES TODAY,” he wrote in a countywide alert.




This story originally appeared on LA Times

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