Monday, January 10, 2005
January 10, 2005
California Seeks Footing as Sky Keeps Falling
ALIBU, Calif., Jan. 9 - So much for sunny California.
Since just after Christmas, the balmy climes of a state known for clear blue skies and swaying palm trees have given way to almost relentless, pounding rain, producing landslides, flooding and chaos on the highways.
At higher elevations, the snowfall has broken records, delighting skiers but stranding many on mountain roads before they could get to the slopes.
Wicked weather across the United States was blamed for several deaths over the weekend from Southern California to Pennsylvania.
A man drowned Sunday morning after the sport utility vehicle in which he was riding skidded on the mud-drenched Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, hit a utility pole and plunged off the side of the road onto the rocky beach below. Three other passengers clambered onto the vehicle's roof as waves crashed around them.
Another man drowned when he was swept into a swollen stream north of here, in Ventura County. In Glendale, northeast of downtown Los Angeles, a car accident on a slippery road claimed two lives.
In the east, flooding along a wide swath of the Ohio River in Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio forced many residents to evacuate.
In Industry, Pa., northwest of Pittsburgh, three members of a tugboat crew were killed on Sunday when the boat and three barges sank after being pushed through a dam on the Ohio River by currents made stronger by heavy rains, The Associated Press reported. One person was missing. Rescue crews arriving on the scene determined the swift water was too dangerous to enter, said Chuck Ward, the assistant fire chief in Industry.
"The worst thing was, you could see two people in the boat screaming for help," Chief Ward told The A.P.
The Ohio River normally flows about 3 to 4 miles an hour, but the current was running about 10 to 15 miles an hour on Sunday because of the rains, said John Anderson, the lockmaster. After the accident, the Coast Guard restricted traffic along five miles of the river near the dam.
In Louisville, Ky., officials scrambled to address meteorologists' predictions that the Ohio River would rise this week to about five feet above flood stage, its highest level in eight years. By Cincinnati the river was more than 2 feet above its 52-foot flood stage on Sunday, with forecasts calling for a crest at 57.5 feet.
In parts of western and northern Ohio, about 66,000 people remained without electricity on Sunday. In Pennsylvania, the number was about 37,000.
In Utah, along the eastern edge of the western storms, two people were killed on Saturday in separate avalanches.
In Nevada, officials in Reno, which was lashed by a severe storm on Dec. 30, closed the airport for a second time in two weeks and only the third time in 40 years. Dozens of Sunday church services and all weekend high school sporting events were canceled.
Ben Moyer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard, Calif., said that from Friday morning to Sunday evening in Los Angeles County, 3 to 7 inches of rain fell on the coast and in the valleys and 10 to 21 inches of rain fell in the mountains. The storm was not expected to clear up until Tuesday afternoon, he said.
Almost no part of California escaped the violent weather.
Residents of a mobile home park in Santa Clarita, northwest of Los Angeles, were evacuated after a surging creek ruptured an eight-foot retaining wall. In the Studio City area of Los Angeles, a two-story hillside house collapsed; a man and his two children were pulled from the rubble with minor injuries.
In Malibu, rocks tumbled from hills sodden with rain, closing four fog-shrouded mountain roads. On beachfront Malibu Road, residents warily eyed a hill above that shifted visibly on Sunday morning, threatening at least two houses.
"This is a mess," one of the homeowners, Lynne Kern, said as she watched firefighters pile sandbags across her driveway, the rain falling in sheets.
In eastern California, heavy snow across the Sierra Nevada closed three mountain highways. More than 220 people spent Saturday night in an Amtrak train stuck in deep snow west of Donner Summit; the train returned to Sacramento on Sunday, The A.P. reported.
On Malibu Road, Oliver Damavandi, a sophomore at the University of San Diego, said he was watching television in his living room on Sunday morning when he heard what sounded like a gust of wind. Then the large eucalyptus tree in the yard, its root system unhinged by the sodden, shifting ground, fell on the house.
"It went 'boom!' and the glass shattered in the big window," Mr. Damavandi said. "It was scary. I thought I was going to go with it. Now we've got a hole in the roof. It's a bummer because my dad just got done remodeling the place."
