While the majority of the megastorm’s fury was concentrated in Northern California on Tuesday, there was plenty of rain to go around in the southern half of the state, bringing evacuation orders to celebrity hotspots like Santa Barbara and Montecito, disrupting film and TV production, and sopping up the already gloomy Golden Globes.
Every year, the state has heavy rain around this time, which is usually the subject of jokes about Californian drivers in the rain or pictures of people “white water” rafting on flooded roads in rainwater that is hardly white. In fact, Southern California has been in an emergency drought for three years, so we need need rain. But most experts agree that this storm won’t help with the drought situation. It simply appears to be causing destruction, but on an extremely serious scale.
Since the rainstorm began on Sunday, up to 50,000 people have been told to leave their homes in California due to the threat of mudslides and rising rivers, and nearly 200,000 people have lost electricity. After bringing down the bulk of its “atmospheric river” on Tuesday, a continent-sized offshore cyclone that extended well beyond the state’s northern and southern boundaries was forecast to cause up to seven more inches of rain as the weekend drew near.
Civil authorities have responded to several hundred distress calls over the past few days across the state, including in Santa Barbara, the city that is home to Oprah Winfrey and other well-to-do people from Hollywood. On Tuesday, rescuers worked arduously to free several hundred people and horses who were trapped behind a flooded road.
Ellen DeGeneres posted a video of a horrifying channel of murky water roaring behind her home in Montecito, California, claiming it is often “a trickle.”
Luke Mullen, who plays “Barbie,” posted a scene from close to his Santa Barbara house where a creek that is currently raging rapids “rarely has water” in it:
The huge storm was causing havoc wherever it struck:
A Tesla drove into a swimming pool in Pasadena, just outside of Los Angeles; the driver, her kid, and her female passenger were all saved. Rescuers in San Luis Obispo County suspended their search for a 5-year-old kid who had been carried away by the Central Coast’s pounding waters. Vehicles were getting swept up in flash flood floods even in downtown Los Angeles:
According to Adam Smith, an applied climatologist and catastrophe expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the damage was already estimated to be worth at least $1 billion throughout the entire state. A break was anticipated for much of the state later in the week, and another pair of Pacific storms were predicted for the weekend, according to The Weather Channel.
The Golden Globes ceremony on Tuesday night may be remembered as a wet one if it ends up being the awards show’s final appearance at the Beverly Hilton, or possibly the last on network television. The Beverly Hills red carpet appeared more like a deep scarlet due to rain in the Los Angeles area, but arriving celebs and visitors were completely shielded by plastic cages, protecting them from immediate threats like running makeup and wind-tousled hair.
Elsewhere in greater Los Angeles, TV and film productions were scrambling to get rain checks as permitted productions were forced to pack up sensitive equipment and ride out the storms, according to FilmLA, the area’s permitting agency.
“While I cannot share specifics or the names of the productions affected, we are assisting many productions to adjust their permitted locations and filming dates with permit riders,” FilmLA spokesman Philip Sokoloski told TheWrap. “We are also seeing companies withdraw their permit applications as a result of the recent winter storms.”
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