WRIGHTWOOD, California \u2014 Three days of heavy downpours that spawned flash flooding and mudslides across Southern California subsided on Friday, as residents of \u200bhomes in the hard-hit mountain resort of Wrightwood began digging out mud and assessing damage.<\/p>\n
The holiday storm drenched the greater Los Angeles basin with up to 6 inches of rain by Friday, with 12 inches or more measured in lower-elevation mountains \u2060east of the city, according to the National Weather Service.<\/p>\n
The deluge, which began around Christmas Eve, was spawned by the region’s latest atmospheric river storm, a vast airborne stream of dense \u200cmoisture siphoned from the Pacific and carried inland.<\/p>\n
The torrential rains were accompanied by strong, gusty winds that toppled trees and power lines \u2060across the region, causing power outages. Heavy snow fell in the upper mountain areas.<\/p>\n
Even before the storm hit, authorities were issuing evacuation warnings to neighborhoods \u200cconsidered vulnerable to flash floods and \u200ddebris flows, especially near hillsides previously ravaged by wildfires. Motorists were urged to avoid travel whenever possible.<\/p>\n
Although rainfall was \u2060tapering off on Friday, a flood watch remained in effect for much of Southern \u2060California.<\/p>\n
Homes swallowed in mud<\/p>\n
In Wrightwood, a town of about 5,000 residents that bore the brunt of the storm in the San Gabriel Mountains northeast of Los Angeles, county safety inspectors began initial assessments of property losses.<\/p>\n
Several dozen homes were heavily damaged by rivers of mud that poured through the town on Wednesday, and officials were on standby for additional debris flows that might occur, San Bernardino County Fire Department spokesman Ryan Beckers said.<\/p>\n
Chairs and a table stand partially buried inside a damaged house as heavy rains from an atmospheric river fall in Wrightwood, California, on Friday. (Photo: Jill Connelly, Reuters)<\/p>\n
“Evacuation warnings for Wrightwood are still in effect, and all the roads in the area are closed, except to residents,” he said.<\/p>\n
Misty Cheng, 49, an accountant who owns a vacation home in \u200dWrightwood, said she learned the property was being swallowed by a mudslide from a neighbor who sent her video footage.<\/p>\n
“My house is buried in over 5 feet of mud,” said Cheng, speaking to Reuters by cellphone from her primary residence in nearby Upland, where she was staying when the slide occurred.<\/p>\n
A stream of mud had forced its way into the house through a crushed wall of the attached garage, filling the living room. By the time she ventured back to the property herself to see the damage first-hand and salvage some belongings, the mud had hardened into a solid enough mound for her to stand on.<\/p>\n
“I was able to get a truckload \u200cof personal items” out of the house, mostly from the second floor, which was left untouched, she said. Without flood insurance, Cheng said she started a GoFundMe page to raise money \u200cfor repairs.<\/p>\n
Aerial video footage posted online by the fire department showed clusters of homes and vehicles in the town caked in walls of mud as crews in front-loaders began clearing clogged roadways.<\/p>\n
Beckers said emergency teams rescued a couple of dozen people who were trapped by high water and debris flows in their vehicles or homes over the holidays, but no deaths or serious injuries were reported in Wrightwood.<\/p>\n
The Weather Service said Southern California was expected to dry out over \u2060the weekend, while across the country, \u200ba major winter storm threatened to begin dumping record levels of snow over parts \u2060of New York state starting on \u200cFriday night.<\/p>\n
Contributing: Steve Gorman and Rich McKay<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WRIGHTWOOD, California \u2014 Three days of heavy downpours that spawned flash flooding and mudslides across Southern California subsided…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111035,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,6996,6995,643,6813,1286,972,2268,100,4201,6997,127,4509,821,4591,19],"class_list":{"0":"post-111034","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-headlines","10":"tag-california-news","11":"tag-cars","12":"tag-classifieds","13":"tag-environment","14":"tag-homes","15":"tag-jobs","16":"tag-local","17":"tag-nature","18":"tag-news","19":"tag-radio","20":"tag-salt-lake","21":"tag-sports","22":"tag-television","23":"tag-traffic","24":"tag-utah","25":"tag-weather"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}