Ahead of another severe storm warning, Mayor Todd Gloria issued an evacuation warning Wednesday to low-lying areas of the city, devastated by flooding last week. The evacuation is currently voluntary, said the mayor, and designed to keep the public ready should an evacuation become mandatory.
The San Diego River is prone to flooding, especially during conditions like Thursday’s expected storm. Hundreds of unhoused people living along the riverbed are especially vulnerable to rising waters. It was a race against time on Wednesday to ensure everybody knows it.
A cold Pacific storm will drop 2 to 2.5 inches of rain across much of San Diego County from Thursday morning to Friday afternoon, possibly causing heavy runoff in a region still recovering from last week’s damaging, storm-induced flooding, the National Weather Service said.
The atmospheric river that deluged San Diego last week followed close on the heels of enormous waves that punished the California coast at the beginning of the year, with both weather events setting off alarms in more ways than one.
For the second time in a month, torrential flooding returned to Southern California this week with El Niño-fueled rains rolling in off the Pacific Ocean. This time San Diego felt the punch. The city, known for weather “the closest thing to perfect in America,” experienced one of its wettest days on record.
Weather officials had been warning Californians about the wrath of El Niño for months — even as some residents had begun to think the typically soaking climate pattern had gone AWOL.
The pump is primed for another stretch of very stormy weather next week and into early February. What forecasters have yet to fully determine is where the next fire hose of moisture will be aimed: at San Diego again, at points to the north or even at the entire state of California.
In a matter of minutes Monday morning, communities across southeastern San Diego were transformed into disaster zones: Families fled their homes in chest-deep floodwaters; vehicles were swept downstream as roads became rivers; residents cried for help from their rooftops.
San Diego’s dangerous flash flood on Monday may not be the state’s last such event of the next couple of weeks, as a weather pattern favorable to atmospheric rivers takes shape across the Pacific Ocean.
As California’s traditional season for rain and snow began last fall, meteorologists and hydrologists predicted that the state would probably experience a second year of heavy precipitation.
