Rain lingers over parts of California from big, slow-moving storm systems
This story contains information that may be upsetting to some readers.
A woman walks past a downed power line as rain falls in Santa Clarita, Calif. in this photo taken by Mike Nelson. (Mike Nelson / Special to the Press-Enterprise)
If any one particular weather event is in the minds of Californians, it’s the power outage that swept through some of Southern California late Thursday.
Southern Californians could be forgiven for thinking the same thing happened in California, as a similar sequence of weather events hit the Golden State.
But that wasn’t the case.
A series of three storms from the Pacific that started as small, fast-moving systems were instead a giant slow-moving storm system that moved across the state, then back across the Pacific to hit California again.
As the first Pacific storm was moving eastward, it brushed the coast near Los Angeles, then headed south around and through the Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.
Two days later, the second Pacific storm came barreling through Los Angeles — again the first of the long series that was to last for four days as a super typhoon and then a typhoon, and to last another week as a storm.
“The two storms were a bit more powerful,” a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard told our news partners at the Press-Enterprise.
“It’s unusual for two storms to come together. It would take a stronger storm to get those two together than it did. But that storm brought rain to California again.”
The first storms that came in at times to slow were the so-called “tandem storms” that happened on two separate fronts. The two were both super typhoons.
One of the storms hit the East Coast — a super typhoon named Haiyan that killed at least 8,200 people since it was first spotted in the Philippines last month.
The other storm hit the western part of California — a super typhoon named Super Typhoon Mangkhut, which killed more than 2