In this American Western State affected by “rivers of the sky” for several weeks, 34,000 people had to flee their home.
MO12345lemonde with AFP
Strong rains were still struck, Tuesday, December 10, California. In recent weeks, successive storms have already killed seventeen in this western state of the United States, forcing the authorities to order the evacuation of many regions.
The torrential rains of the last two days on soils already saturated with water have caused vast power cuts, many floods, uprooted quantity of trees and cuts major roads, the waves sometimes carrying motorists.
The Governor’s office, Gavin Newsom, reported in a statement that at least 34,000 people had to flee their home. “We are not at the end of our sorrows. We expect the storms to continue at least until January 18,” Newsom told the press: “For the moment, we have seventeen Confirmed death. I underline it tragicly because only these deaths are confirmed. “
A Paso Robles, a small town halfway from Los Angeles and San Francisco, a 5-year-old boy was swept away by the waves on Monday and remained missing, according to a sheriff’s press release. The flood had trapped the car in which he was with his mother, who could have been rescued by a neighbor. The authorities had to suspend their research on Monday afternoon because of the weather.
In Bakersfield, in the center of the state, two motorists died after a tree fell on the road, according to the Los Angeles Times. Tuesday, around 110,000 households and companies were deprived of electricity, according to the specialized Poweroutage site. 2> “rivers du Ciel”
According to the National Weather Service (NWS), American weather services, after a short respite on Tuesday evening, a new storm is to surge California on Wednesday, with up to 180 millimeters of rain expected in the northern state . California is currently undergoing “an endless assault of atmospheric rivers”, unprecedented since 2005, according to the NWS. These “rivers of the sky”, which are formed thanks to the water vapor of the tropics and travel and then pour out of water on the west coast of the United States, are rarely so frequent.
North of Los Angeles, near Santa Barbara, the coastal community of Montecito, a lair of celebrities where Prince Harry and Meghan Markle live, was under an evacuation order on Monday, which ended Tuesday in the middle of the afternoon.
This enclave, where actress Jennifer Aniston and the television presenter Oprah Winfrey have luxurious villas, is a microcosm of the extremes to which California has been subjected, hard hit by drought for two decades. Five years ago, a vast fire devastated the mountains that surround Montecito. Result: the absence of vegetation makes it very vulnerable to landslides. In January 2018, mudslides caused by heavy rains caused the death of twenty-three people.
Other regions have been the subject of evacuations on the part of the authorities, as in the county of Santa Cruz, near San Francisco, where a pier was destroyed last week. If it is difficult to establish a direct link between these series storms and climate change, scientists regularly explain that warming increases the frequency and intensity of extreme meteorological phenomena.
The storm last week had already deprived of electricity tens of thousands of people, caused by strong floods and caused landslides. It had occurred only a few days after another flood of rain on New Year’s Eve.
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The exceptional rains of the last days already exceed in several regions the annual average of precipitation. However, they will not be enough to reconstruct the water reserves in California. Several winters of precipitation superior to normal would be necessary to compensate for drought in recent years, according to experts.