California gets break from storms ahead of New Year’s eve rain

golden state is in for a legal brief weekend respite from detrimental holiday storms that killed 4 people and hobbled Christmas travel, but weather officials warned of more wet weather heading to the rain-soaked state starting on New Year’s Eve.

Heavy rains pummeled much of California over the past seven days, bringing flash floods, mudslides, and power outages that caused waterlogged freeways and widespread flight delays.

Some areas of the state saw more than 17 inches of rain and winds topping 110 mph during the storms, the National Weather Service said. A tornado touched down in a Los Angeles neighborhood, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Four people died in a series of atmospheric rivers, NBC News reported, including a man found dead inside a van submerged in mud in Lancaster on Friday. A Sacramento County sheriff’s deputy was killed in a crash on Christmas Eve, a San Diego man died after being hit by a fallen tree branch and a Redding man died in severe flooding in the Northern California city.

Two ski patrollers were hospitalized after being caught in an avalanche at Mammoth Mountain on Friday, according to NBC News. All lifts remained closed Saturday at the popular ski area, which received 38 inches of snow during the storms and saw winds gusting as high as 60 miles per hour. Heavenly Lake Tahoe ski resort was running 13 of 27 lifts and reported 58 inches of fresh snow in the last seven days.

More than 50,000 homes and businesses in the state were without power Friday afternoon, mostly in Northern California, according to PowerOutage.us. By Saturday morning, that figure had fallen to about 17,000. The Los Angeles Fire Department deployed a helicopter to rescue a woman swept into a stormwater wash Friday.

Much of the state was in for sunny skies over the weekend, the weather service said, though it warned that gusty winds blowing into Southern California through Monday and Tuesday could cause more damage. “This will be a worrisome wind event since the recent rainfall will make trees more susceptible to toppling,” the National Weather Service said.

California is set to see another round of rain starting New Year’s Eve and into the following day. The weather service said the storm should be much weaker than previous atmospheric rivers, bringing up to 1.5 inches of rain to some parts of Southern California between midnight and 10 p.m. On New Year’s Day.

Several days of deluge impacted Los Angeles areas that were devastated by massive wildfires roughly a year ago. The charred-off vegetation makes the land resistant to soaking up the water, increasing the vulnerability to landslides, mudslides and power outages. It’s a risk that will persist whenever especially heavy rains strike Southern California until the soil recovers and vegetation grows back.

“Those soils are still hydrophobic, which means that rain just runs off like it’s hitting hard dirt or concrete,” Scott Kleebauer, a meteorologist at the Weather Prediction Center, said last week. “There are burn scars that have lasted for four or five years before you see any improvement.”

The heaviest precipitation hit mountain areas of the Golden State, from the San Gabriel Mountains in the south to the Sierra Nevada to the north. More than 6 inches (15 centimeters) of rain soaked Mount Baldy and Mount San Antonio east of Los Angeles, triggering mudslides in Wrightwood, where the 2024 Bridge Fire blackened 56,000 acres.

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