Climate chaos continues as dangerous megastorm hits California

Hot on the heels of a major winter storm that inundated Northern California with torrential rains and deadly flooding, residents of the Golden State braced Wednesday for what’s expected to be an even more devastating storm—the latest climate chaos to wreak havoc in the U.S. West amid a worsening planetary emergency.

A super-potent combination of a bomb cyclone and Pineapple Express atmospheric river has the nation’s most populous state on its highest level of emergency alert as the National Weather Service (NWS) said Wednesday that “a major storm and atmospheric river is poised to impact California today and Thursday with heavy to excessive rainfall, flooding with debris flows and landslides near recent burn scar areas, heavy mountain snow, and high winds.”

“To put it simply, ” an NWS forecaster said, “this will likely be one of the most impactful systems on a widespread scale that this meteorologist has seen in a long while.”

“The impacts will include widespread flooding, roads washing out, hillside collapsing, trees down (potentially full groves), widespread power outages, immediate disruption to commerce, and the worst of all, likely loss of human life,” the forecaster continued. “This is truly a brutal system that we are looking at and needs to be taken seriously.”

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), told the Los Angeles Times that “the main reason why this storm is going to have a larger impact than it would have had if it had happened two or three weeks ago is that it’s rained a lot in Northern California already recently, so everything’s really saturated.”

More than five inches of rain inundated San Francisco on Saturday alone—the city’s second-wettest day ever logged in over 170 years of record-keeping.

“There’s already active river flooding with levee breaks in Sacramento County, so that’s the stage for something pretty intense coming in,” Swain added, referring to last week’s deadly storm. “It’s this progression and sequencing that’s a big part of what’s going on.”

Furthermore, years of drought in California have caused record levels of arboreal mortality in forests as well as in urban areas, with dead trees posing a hazard to people, homes, and power lines during high winds.

While rainfall is desperately needed in a drought-ravaged state whose 10 largest reservoirs are anywhere from about one-third to three-quarters below capacity, experts say the current barrage of storms could be as much of a curse as a blessing.

“They’re two sides of the same coin: They can be extremely beneficial because they bring so much of California’s water supply to the state or they can also be drought busters,” Scripps Institute of Oceanography climate scientist Julie Kalansky told CNN. “But when the duration becomes too long, they become too strong, they come back-to-back, and the landscape doesn’t get an opportunity to absorb all the rain, it can lead to this flooding.”

Originally published at Commondreams.org.

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