By Maria Caspani
(Reuters) -Heavy rainfall and hurricane-force winds hit most of storm-battered California on Sunday, forecasters said, knocking out power and threatening flooding and mudslides.
The storm is the second Pineapple Express weather system, or atmospheric river storm, to hit the state in the past week and arrives as Los Angeles welcomes scores of celebrities for the music industry’s glitzy Grammy awards.
The severe conditions prompted the National Weather Service’s (NWS) Bay Area office to issue a rare hurricane-force wind warning for Big Sur and nearby areas.
“It is quite extreme at the moment,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles, said of the gusts sweeping the region in a live-stream on Sunday.
The NWS recorded peak wind gusts of 80 mph or higher (129 kph) in some locations across the state.
The intense weather system cut off power to over 323,000 homes and businesses by Sunday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.us.
The power company with the most outages was Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) with over 261,000 customers out of service. PG&E said in a release that it activated its Emergency Operations Center to tackle the winter weather.
Marking another rare event, the weather agency put a large swath of southern California under a “High Risk of Excessive Rainfall” through Monday.
“This is a DANGEROUS SYSTEM with major risks to life and property. Substantial flooding. Residents should heed any evacuation orders,” the Los Angeles office of the NWS said on social media. “Stay off the roads, especially the freeways, this afternoon through at least Monday morning.”
The coastal city and port of Long Beach near Los Angeles could get more rain this week than it does during an entire year, said Mayor Rex Richardson, who is expecting 5-7 inches (13-18 cm) starting Sunday through Tuesday.
Los Angeles could get hit with as much wind and rain as what Tropical Storm Hilary brought in August, Mayor Karen Bass said.
California’s southern and central coasts are bracing for an inch of rain an hour and totals of 3-6 inches (7-15 cm), the U.S. National Weather Service said. As much as 6-12 inches are expected in the foothills and lower-elevation mountains.
The Los Angeles and Santa Barbara areas were both at high risk for excessive rainfall on Sunday and Monday, with forecasters anticipating “near continuous rainfall” for the next 48 hours.
Evacuation orders were issued for some of those counties’ residents, as well as residents of the San Jose region and Ventura County.
With soil already saturated by last week’s storm and streams running high, the flood potential is even higher, forecasters said.
Rain will turn into heavy snow at higher elevations in the mountain ranges of northern California and the Sierra Nevada, with total accumulation of several feet forecast for the Sierra region through Tuesday, and snow rates of 2-3 inches per hour the NWS said.
(Reporting by Maria Caspani and Scott DiSavino in New York; Editing by Lisa Shumaker, Chizu Nomiyama and Nick Zieminski)
