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Southern California is bracing for more severe weather after a powerful winter storm caused flash flooding, power outages and mudslides. NPR's Sarah Ventre reports.
SARAH VENTRE, BYLINE: The small mountain town of Wrightwood, California, sits on the Pacific Crest Trail northeast of Los Angeles. Over the winter, it attracts skiers and snowboarders. But throughout Christmas, the town was disrupted as mountain homes were buried in mud, roads were flooded with water and debris and some had orders to evacuate or had to deal with the aftermath. One of those people is Maria Faura (ph).
MARIA FAURA: The water was going by so fast.
VENTRE: Faura owns two motels in Wrightwood. She says things were so bad that the streets...
FAURA: Became rivers. There's a lot of debris on the road - a lot of rocks, trash cans and not to mention eroded roads.
VENTRE: Faura says she had to evacuate guests from her properties and cancel all of her bookings, likely through Saturday.
FAURA: There's a lot of mud. A few of our rooms were damaged due to mud that came in through a couple of the doors in some of our rooms. So, yeah, so it's kind of a massive cleanup now for mud.
VENTRE: And there's concern about more trouble on the way. Christopher Prater is with the San Bernardino County Fire Protection District. He says that once the mud and debris flows started to impact structures, responders had to transition to what he calls a life-saving operation.
CHRISTOPHER PRATER: They went door-to-door for - to do checks, assist in evacuations and perform rescues. They also performed multiple rescues of people trapped in vehicles.
VENTRE: Prater also says that a few people needed to be rescued from their roofs by helicopter. Ariel Cohen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, says that this intense weather comes as a result of an atmospheric river system, which is bringing lots of moisture into the area.
ARIEL COHEN: It's a very slow-moving system such that we have a significant amount of energy in the atmosphere that's combining with that moisture, causing more and more impulses of moderate and heavy rain to stack up.
VENTRE: Storms are expected in the area throughout this afternoon. Residents are advised to keep a close eye on communications and to act quickly if any further evacuation orders are issued.
Sarah Ventre, NPR News.
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