Biden declares emergency in California after 'parade of cyclones' kill 12

LOS ANGELES - US President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration for California on Sunday after a week of storms killed at least 12 people in the past 10 days and knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in the state.

The emergency declaration authorises the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to coordinate disaster relief efforts and mobilise emergency resources, the White House said in a statement.

In the past week, severe weather spawned violent wind gusts that toppled trucks, flooded the streets of small towns along northern California’s coast and churned up a storm surge that destroyed a pier in Santa Cruz.

A woman living in a homeless encampment along the Sacramento River died on Saturday night during a raging storm when a tree branch fell on her tent.

Mr Joe Costa, the woman’s neighbour in the encampment, told Reuters on Sunday that he had found her barely breathing.

“I started yelling for 911... I opened her side of her tent and pulled her out, and she was unresponsive.” he recalled.

First responders attempted to resuscitate the woman before taking her to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead, according to local news reports.

Forecasters with the National Weather Service (NWS) warned that northern and central California were still in the path of a “relentless parade of cyclones”, promising little relief for the region until the middle of the week.

According to PowerOutage.us, the utility with the most outages was Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) with over 73,000 customers without power, followed by Sacramento Municipal Utility District at 50,000.

PG&E is a unit of California energy company PG&E Corp.

“More than 4,100 crews along with resources are staged throughout our service area, including regions most impacted by the storms,” PG&E said on its website on Sunday. 

Two overlapping phenomena – an immense airborne stream of dense moisture from the ocean called an atmospheric river and a sprawling, hurricane-force low-pressure system known as a bomb cyclone – caused devastating flooding and record snowfall over the past week.

The latest storms vividly illustrated the consequences of warmer sea and air temperatures caused by climate change.

“These storms are supercharged by climate change,” California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said.

Despite the temporary deluge, the western United States remains in a two-decade drought. While climate change has resulted in extreme heat, drought and floods, experts say the western US would need several exceptionally rainy years in a row to replenish aquifers and reservoirs.

Another severe storm was supposed to hit on Monday, and another atmospheric river, the sixth of the season, was expected later in the week, state officials said.

“We expect to see the worst of it still ahead of us,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said.

The heavy rain and snow have already caused significant flooding and ground saturation, meaning the next storm to move through early this week would bring an additional flood threat, the NWS said.

Forecasters said 1.5m of snow could fall on the Sierra Nevada mountains by Tuesday. REUTERS

SACRAMENTO, California - California on Sunday braced for more severe weather after a week of torrential downpours and damaging winds killed at least 12 people in the past 10 days and knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses.

Forecasters with the National Weather Service warned that northern and central California were still in the path of a “relentless parade of cyclones”, promising little relief for the region until the middle of the week.

At least 12 people have died from weather-related incidents in California in the past 10 days, Governor Gavin Newsom told a news conference, including a toddler killed by a fallen redwood tree crushing a mobile home in northern California.

More than 420,000 homes were still without power in California as of Sunday afternoon, according to data from PowerOutage.us.

In the last week, severe weather spawned violent wind gusts that toppled semi-trucks, flooded the streets of small towns along northern California’s coast and churned up storm surge that destroyed a pier in the beach city of Santa Cruz.

Newsom declared a state of emergency on Wednesday and said he had asked the White House to issue a federal emergency declaration ahead of the coming storms.