Killer California bomb cyclone claims second victim
Heavy storms are blamed for the death of an infant and a teenager in northern California, which is still experiencing heavy, flooding rains.
A 19-year-old Fairfield, Calif., woman was killed Wednesday morning when her vehicle hydroplaned on a flooded road before striking a utility pole, witnesses told police. Fairfield cops said in a statement it’s “likely” speed unsafe for road conditions was a contributing factor and warned motorists to use caution.
Fifty miles west, a 2-year-old boy in Sonoma, Calif. was killed Wednesday evening when unrelenting weather caused a redwood tree to fall onto the mobile home where the victim and his parents lived, ABC News reports.
Winds in Sonoma reached 85 m.p.h., according to MSNBC. PowerOutage.US reports more than 170,000 Californians were without power Thursday morning. That includes more than 9,000 residence in Mendocino County, which has fewer than 54,000 power customers. To the north in Humboldt County, 8,800 of the county’s 99,802 customers were left in the dark.
AccuWeather reported 132 m.p.h. winds on the northwest side of Lake Tahoe. The forecasting service said rain is also possible Thursday in the famously dry Death Valley area.
The southern part of the Golden State was also having a wet and windy mid-week. An inch of rain has fallen on Los Angeles International Airport by Thursday. That’s more than a third of the total rainfall LAX typically sees in all of January, according to AccuWeather.
Rain continued wreaking havoc throughout the Golden State during Thursday morning’s commute.
On the positive side, a U.S. Drought Monitor report released Thursday indicated “exceptional drought” conditions that had affected 16.5% of the state in September are not currently an issue — and that data was gathered prior to Wednesday’s downpours.
Conditions in California are described as the atmospheric river of a “bomb cyclone” over the Pacific Ocean. Los Angeles station KTLA described the weather phenomenon as “storms that typically form in winter when a midlatitude cyclone undergoes ‘rapid intensification’ at speeds of at least 24 millibars, the measure of atmospheric pressure, over a 24-hour period.”
The Weather Channel forecasts rainy conditions in San Francisco throughout the next two weeks, with a cloudy respite Friday. Los Angeles is expected to be mostly dry for the next week before a string of showers begins mid-month, according to Weather.com’s 10-day forecast.
