Stormy sea that overwhelms cars, rain that floods streets, airports, houses. The cyclone that came in California with an unprecedented amount of water is devastating the West coast of the United States, a vast area involving 5 million people. For days the storms have devastated entire areas, transforming cities into lakes and killing at least 18 people. According to forecasts, a new strong perturbation is on the way.
Rain a year in two weeks
“The state has suffered from droughts for the past four years, and now we have storm after storm,” said the California governor Eleni Kounalakis. “We’ve had six storms in the last two weeks. This is the kind of weather you would get in a year and we’ve compressed it into just two weeks.”
It is “one of the deadliest disasters in the history of our state,” he stressed Brian Ferguson, spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “Yesterday, we had perhaps more air rescues than we ever had in any other single day in the history of the state,” she added, explaining that the Golden State it’s not out of the woods yet. “We continue to be concerned about our waterways, our culverts and some of the landslide-prone areas, particularly along our central coast”
The damage
According to experts, the damages exceed one billion dollars. Thousands of people across the state who lived near rain-filled streams and rivers were driven from their homes. On social media there are images of highways transformed into rivers, entire cities underwater with cars submerged up to the roofs and people leaving their homes as best they can, taking away everything they could save.
