by Alexandra E Petri, Grace Toohey and David Zahinser at LA Times
Record rainfall. Inaccessible highways. Widespread power outages. Residents stranded. Streets buried or washed out.
In the wake of Hilary’s lashing of Southern California, the region awoke Monday to lingering damage from the historic storm, with debris flows and flash floods leaving paths of destruction from San Bernardino’s mountain towns to Riverside’s desert communities and along Hollywood streets.
In some areas, the storm’s damage is still being assessed as officials work to access cut-off communities and rescue those who were stranded.
“Some places did see rather severe flooding, and that extends actually into Nevada,” Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist, said Monday. But “some areas in Southern California did escape a worst-case flood event.”
While forecasters, in many cases, predicted the correct rain totals, Swain said, the extremely fast rainfall rates didn’t materialize — sparing the region from much of the “catastrophic” flooding that flashed in warnings…
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