Crews worked to dig roads, buildings and care home residents out of the mud across a wide swath of Southwestern U.S. desert Monday, as the first tropical storm to hit Southern California in 84 years headed north, prompting flood watches and warnings in half a dozen states
— steering it on an unusual but not quite unprecedented path that dumped rain in some normally bone-dry places.
“It’s quite unusual for an Eastern Pacific storm to be so large since they are usually small and stay deep in the tropics,” said University of Albany atmospheric scientist Kristen Corbosiero, an expert on Pacific hurricanes. In the Coachella Valley city of Desert Hot Springs, Steven Michael Chacon said the roads in the housing development where he and his husband live were impassable due to flooding and he was concerned emergency crews might not be able to reach people.Authorities also say a woman was unaccounted for after witnesses saw her trailer swept away in a flash flood.
“We basically blew all of our previous rainfall records out of the water,” National Weather Service meteorologist Elizabeth Adams in San Diego told The Associated Press.
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