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The recent fires and rains in Southern California have led to mudslides, debris flows and rock falls along the Santa Barbara County coast. At least 17 people have died, dozens of homes have been destroyed and, in the coastal village of Montecito, the water system was severely damaged. With extreme weather becoming the norm in California, Take Two reached out to Stanford University earth science professor, Noah Diffenbaugh, to learn more about the state’s infrastructure and its level of preparedness for natural disasters.

With word of new snow on the mountains, Laura Kless woke up at dawn Wednesday, Jan. 10, dusted off her snowboarding gear and hit the winding road up to Big Bear from Huntington Beach — she wanted to be one of the first to get a taste of the slopes. Kless, a skier in high school who used to ditch class after fresh storms and picked up snowboarding over the past 20 years, knows the best day to hit the mountain is right after a snowfall.

Drenching storms Monday and Tuesday smashed Northern California’s unusually dry December weather pattern, dumping nearly half a foot of rain on the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Marin hills in 48 hours — with twice that much in Big Sur — and bringing many Bay Area cities their wettest day in at least a year.

Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday proposed a $190.3 billion overall spending plan for the 2018-19 fiscal year that would boost funding for K-12 and higher education, as well as infrastructure and the state’s Rainy Day reserve fund. That’s up from the $183 billion budget Brown signed last summer. The plan includes a $132 billion general fund budget, which pays for the state’s day-to-day operations. It’s up from the $125 billion general fund budget Brown signed last year.  It calls for raising the voter-mandated Rainy Day fund by more than $5 billion, to a total of $13.5 billion.

California skiers and riders are facing the best conditions of the season after recent storms dumped snow from Lake Tahoe to Mammoth Lakes, frosting slopes ahead of the long Martin Luther King holiday weekend. It was a warm storm, particularly for L.A.’s local mountain resorts, and San Bernardino Mountain operations were hoping that Monday’s rain would turn to snow on Tuesday.