A massive Pacific storm unleashed high winds, torrential rains and heavy snow across California for a second day on Thursday (January 5), knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes and disrupting road travel with flash floods, rock slides and toppled trees.
At least two fatalities have been reported since Wednesday, one of them a toddler killed by a fallen redwood crushing a mobile home in northern California.
In Santa Cruz, coastal properties were pummeled and at least one bridge and one pier were severely damaged.
Resident Sean Berry predicted the clean up would take time. "It's extensive, especially since this is a small community. You know, we don't have a huge lot of resources for something like that. It's going to take weeks easily, if not months."
And while the extent of flooding and property losses was less dire than many had predicted by the time the storm began tapering off late on Thursday, forecasters warned that more was soon to come.
The storm was powered by 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.
The blast of extreme winter weather marked the third and strongest atmospheric river to strike California since early last week, with at least two more back-to-back storms forecast over the next several days.
The next was expected to arrive late on Friday, posing a renewed threat of flash flooding and mudslides in places now saturated from repeated downpours, the National Weather Service (NWS) said. The most vulnerable areas remained those in hillsides stripped bare of vegetation from past wildfires.
