LOS ANGELES (Dispatches) — Sinkholes swallowed cars and floodwaters swamped towns and swept away a small boy as California was wracked by more wild winter while the next in a powerful string of storms loomed on the horizon.

Millions of residents faced flood warnings, nearly 50,000 people were under evacuation orders, and more than 110,000 homes and businesses were without power because of heavy rains, lightning, hail and landslides.

At least 17 people have died from storms that began late last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom said during a visit to the scenic town of Capitola on the Santa Cruz coast that was hard hit by high surf and flooding creek waters last week. The deaths included a pickup truck driver and motorcyclist killed Tuesday morning when a eucalyptus tree fell on them on Highway 99 in the San Joaquin Valley near Visalia, the California Highway Patrol said.

“We’ve had less people die in the last two years of major wildfires in California than have died since New Year’s Day related to this weather,” Newsom said. “These conditions are serious and they’re deadly.”

The storm dumped more than a foot and a half (45 centimeters) of rain in Southern California mountains and buried Sierra Nevada ski resorts in more than 5 feet (1.5 meters) of snow.

Rockfalls and landslides shut down roads, and gushing runoff turned sections of freeways into waterways. Swollen rivers swamped homes and residents of small communities inundated with water and mud were stranded.

“We’re all stuck out here,” said Brian Briggs, after the deluge unleashed mudslides in remote Matilija Canyon that buried one house completely and cut off the only road to nearby Ojai.

Briggs described a scary night where the canyon creek began to flood people’s yards and the surrounding hills — stripped of vegetation in the 2017 Thomas Fire — began to tumble down in the dark.

Mudflows dragged sheds, gazebos and outhouses into the creek, he said. After helping neighbors get to higher ground, he returned home to find his fence destroyed by waist-deep mud.

A helicopter dropped 10 sheriff’s deputies Tuesday to help the residents of dozens of homes in the canyon and Briggs said he was hoping to be airlifted out.

Raging waters crested the banks of Bear Creek and flooded parts of the city of Merced and neighboring Planada, a small agricultural community along a highway leading to Yosemite National Park.

Neighborhoods were under water with cars submerged up to their roofs. Residents ordered to evacuate carried whatever they could salvage on their backs as they left in the rain.

A break in the weather Tuesday on the central coast allowed searchers near San Miguel to look for Kyle Doan, the child who vanished after he and his mother were stranded in a truck in rising waters. His mother was rescued, but Kyle was swept away, and a seven-hour search Monday turned up only one of his Nikes.

The storms have created what Newsom called a “weather whiplash,” swinging from an epic drought to the other extreme and arriving with a fury and frequency likely to create problems well into next week.

 

Flights, Airports Affected by U.S. FAA System Outage

 

On Wednesday, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) scrambled to fix a system outage overnight that had forced a halt to all U.S. departing flights.

The cause of the problem with a pilot-alerting system, which delayed thousands of flights in the United States, was unclear, but U.S. officials said they had so far found no evidence of a cyberattack.

The outage occurred at a historically slow time for U.S. travel after the December holiday travel season, but airlines have said demand remains strong as travel continues to recover to near pre-pandemic levels.

More than 2,500 flights within, into and out of the United States were delayed as of around 8 a.m. on Wednesday morning, according to online flight tracker FlightAware. Nearly 250 flights were listed as cancelled.

U.S. President Joe Biden said aviation authorities were still unaware what had triggered the grounding of the fights across the U.S. 

“I just spoke with (Transportation Secretary Pete) Buttigieg. They don’t know what the cause is. But I was on the phone with him” Biden said. “I told them to report directly to me when they find out. Aircraft can still land safely, just not take off right now. They don’t know what the cause of it is; they expect in a couple of hours, they’ll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time.”

Buttigieg added in a tweet that he had “been in touch with FAA this morning about an outage affecting a key system for providing safety information to pilots.”