CAPITOLA, Calif. — President Biden traveled to Northern California on Thursday to survey the damage left by weeks of winter storms and assess a recovery effort that officials say could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mr. Biden landed near Capitola, a colorful beach town along the Monterey Bay where a popular pier was nearly washed away by coastal swells and local businesses were damaged by floods. Mr. Biden took an aerial tour of the state’s Central Coast, where flooding and mudslides have wrecked power lines, damaged homes and swallowed cars.
At least 20 people have died, and Deanne Criswell, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday that repairs could cost “several hundred million,” though she expected that number to increase.
In Capitola on Thursday, brilliant blue skies and a smattering of white clouds belied the destruction that had recently swept through. The pier remained snapped in half, the beach was all but entirely washed away and what sand remained was covered by driftwood strewn about like matchsticks.
“Inside the tackle and bait shop, it’s going to smell real bad,” said Jojo Urbancic, 79, pointing to the end of the wharf, where he has been cleaning fish for tips — halibut, stripers, mackerel — for decades. He said he remembered the pier snapping in the same spot during a storm in 1982, and that he hoped it would be fixed in a way this time to last.
Rain and Floods in California
A string of major storms in California has caused extreme flooding and damage across the state.
“I hope he helps get it fixed quickly,” Mr. Urbancic said of Mr. Biden, as a crowd of residents he was standing with buzzed in excitement and pointed their phones toward Marine One and several Ospreys overhead.
Chuck Hammers, who owns a pizza shop along the waterfront that was battered by the storm, said he was set to take Mr. Biden around to the row of businesses that were just beginning to take stock of the damage. The plumbing was shattered from the force of the waves that hit from below and, Mr. Hammers said, owners had to throw away tons of spoiled food. A triangular piece of the pier had landed in front of his shop.
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“There were some dark days of, ‘How are we going to get through this?’” said Mr. Hammers, who opened his store, Pizza My Heart, 37 years ago.
He said that two bars on either side of his shop, which his business relies on for customers to grab slices after a few drinks, feared they would not be able to open in time for spring break, when the line for pizza stretches down the street by a couple hundred feet.
“It’s nice for the smaller guys to feel supported,” he said of the president’s visit. He had the rest of his pizza chain — 25 locations in all — and could keep paying his workers, but the smaller businesses were in need of emergency loans and funds, he said.
Over the weekend, Mr. Biden expanded an earlier disaster declaration in California, which unlocked more federal money to assist in storm recovery efforts and speed up repairs, and over 500 FEMA officials are on the ground in the state.
Despite the heavy rainfall, California is still technically in a drought, and experts say the recent spate of storms will not fully reverse three years that have been the state’s driest on record.
