Lashing rain, deadly floodwaters and vast power outages walloped California from top to bottom Tuesday — and though most of the megastorm’s fury focused on Northern California, there was plenty of rain to go around in the southern half of the state, bringing evacuation orders to celebrity enclaves like Santa Barbara and Montecito, disrupting film and TV production and drenching an already dampened Golden Globes.
Heavy rain at this time is an annual occurrence for the state — typically the stuff of jokes about California drivers in the rain or shots of people “white water” rafting on overflowed roads in rain water that is nowhere near to being white. In fact, we sorely need rain as Southern California has been in emergency drought status for three years. But this storm, by most experts’ accounts, won’t help with that drought status. It just seems to be wreaking havoc — but of a very serious level.
As many as 50,000 people had been ordered to evacuate their homes for fear of rising rivers and inevitable mudslides across California since the rain started Sunday, with nearly 200,000 experiencing power outages. A continent-sized offshore cyclone, stretching well beyond the state’s northern and southern borders, brought down the worst of its “atmospheric river” Tuesday and, after a short break, was expected to deliver another round of destruction with up to seven more inches of rain as the weekend approaches.
Over the past few days, civil authorities have responded to several hundred distress calls throughout the state, including in Santa Barbara — home of Oprah Winfrey and other Hollywood elites — where rescue workers toiled Tuesday to free several hundred people and horses trapped behind a flooded road.
In Montecito, Ellen DeGeneres shared a video of a terrifying channel of muddy water raging behind her home, which she said is normally “a trickle.”
“Barbie” actor Luke Mullen shared a similar scene from near his home in Santa Barbara, where he said a creek, now raging rapids, “rarely has water” in it:
No matter where it hit, the monster storm was causing mayhem:
Just outside of Los Angeles in Pasadena, a Tesla crashed into a swimming pool; the driver, her son and her female passenger were rescued safely. In San Luis Obispo County, rescuers called off the search for a 5-year-old boy swept away by the waters punishing the Central Coast. Even in the urban core of Los Angeles, vehicles were being swept up in flash flood waters:
Statewide, the destruction was already estimated to reach or exceed $1 billion, applied climatologist and disaster expert Adam Smith with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told the Los Angeles Times. And more was in store: Much of the state was expected to get a break in the latter part of the week, with another pair of Pacific storms on tap for the weekend, according to The Weather Channel.
If Tuesday night’s Golden Globes ceremony was to be the awards show’s last go at the Beverly Hilton — or perhaps the last on network television — it’ll go down in history as a wet one. Rainfall in the Los Angeles area had any exposed parts of the Beverly Hills red carpet looking more like a deep crimson, though arriving celebrities and guests were entirely protected by plastic enclosures, keeping them safe from such imminent dangers as 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.”
