Howling winds, pelting rain and heavy snow pummeled California, toppling trees, flipping big rigs, cutting power to more than a million people and threatening mudslides in fire-scarred areas.
Flights were grounded and highways closed in Northern California on Friday as gusts reached 130kph during the second wave of an arctic storm that sent trees crashing onto houses, cars and roads. Forecasters expected the storm to dump as much as 3m of snow in the Sierra Nevada by today.
Highways from Sacramento to San Francisco were closed because of debris or toppled big rigs blocking lanes and local roads were flooded. Interstate 80 was closed in the Sierra, the main link between Northern California and Nevada.
PHOTO: AP
"A huge tree, over 100 years old, just fell across the house. It just wrecked the whole thing," said Faye Reed, whose daughter Teenia owns the damaged home north of Sacramento. "They won't be able to live in it. The whole ceiling fell in, and now it's raining inside."
More than a million people in northern and central California were in the dark. Crews worked to restore power, but it could be days before all the lights are on, Pacific Gas and Electric spokeswoman Darlene Chiu said.
In Southern California, authorities in Orange County ordered an estimated 3,000 residents to evacuate homes in four canyons scarred by wildfires and therefore prone to mudslides.
"It's too late once the rain starts. These areas are extremely vulnerable. You're risking your life and your family's life fundamentally" by ignoring orders, said Steve Sellers of the governor's Office of Emergency Services.
Flash flood warnings were issued in canyon burn areas in Malibu and in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. Riverside and San Bernardino counties, east of Los Angeles, deployed swift-water rescue teams as a precaution. The California Highway Patrol reported flooding in the area.
The state opened its emergency operations center on Friday morning to coordinate storm response and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said he had spoken with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff by phone.
"Preparation is really the heart of this whole thing," Schwarzenegger said after touring the state emergency operation center at the Los Alamitos Joint Training Base.
Homeowners in Southern California stacked sandbags and hay bales around their homes while residents in the low-lying areas of the Central Valley piled sandbags to barricade their homes from streams that forecasters warned might swell.
Also, search teams later on Friday located a missing family of three, who were found safe in a popular hiking destination in the Sierra National Forest. Crews found the family with three other people who had apparently gotten trapped in the woods after the storm hit, Madera County Sheriff's spokeswoman Erica Stuart said. All six hikers were in good condition.
Travelers' flight plans were put on hold in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and Los Angeles when airlines delayed or canceled flights. The state legislature in Sacramento closed offices and sent employees home early.
A wind gust of 200kph was recorded in the Sierra on Friday afternoon, the National Weather Service said.
The huge storm also toppled trees and cut power to thousands of residents in Washington and Oregon.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency