Assessing the damage from California’s 2023 storms is going to take a while.
The storms — and their impacts — aren’t over yet
Assessing the damage from California’s 2023 storms is going to take a while.
AMONG THE MANY challenges in assessing the damages from California’s 2023 storms is that the storms — and their impacts — aren’t over yet.
I’m just catching up on news from yesterday and I see an evacuation order for Pine Flat Village has been published in many places, including HERE in the Porterville Recorder.
Not to be confused with Pine Flat Lake, 120 driving miles to the north, Pine Flat Village is surrounded by Giant Sequoia National Monument and is near California Hot Springs, about 66 driving miles northeast of Bakersfield. As in a number of small communities in the Sierra Nevada, the water system in Pine Flat Village is damaged, and people there have been reliant on bottled drinking water for some time. The latest threat is from potential road and bridge failures within the community.
Roads, bridges and other critical infrastructure throughout the state have been damaged or destroyed by the so-called “bomb cyclones” and “atmospheric rivers” that hit California beginning in January. Agencies and volunteers have been doing their best to shore up the infrastructure, but serious work to assess and efforts to repair lost roads, bridges and more can’t really be accomplished until the storms stop, the snow melts and the floodwaters subside.
Yesterday, according to a news release, “Congressman Kevin McCarthy, Representative of California’s 20th Congressional District and Speaker of the House, joined his bipartisan California House and Senate colleagues in sending a letter to President Biden in support of the State of California’s request for a Major Disaster Declaration following the recent March storms and current flooding.”
The letter to the president was a rare bipartisan effort from California’s delegation — you can read it HERE.
Two days ago, Governor Gavin Newsom requested a Presidential Major Disaster Declaration to bolster the emergency response and recovery in the counties of Calaveras, Kern, Los Angeles, Mariposa, Monterey, San Benito, Santa Cruz, Tulare, and Tuolumne. Read it HERE.
However, McCarthy said, “I am pleased that California’s disaster request includes Kern and Tulare counties. Given that Fresno and Kings counties were not yet included, I have been in touch with FEMA and CalOES, and I anticipate that more counties will likely be added as additional data on damage continues to be collected.”
You can read a March 22 overview from the state about storm response from various agencies HERE.
All of this, I think, was summed up best by Clay Jordan, superintendent of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks:
"Recovery from this year's weather events is going to be a long haul," Jordan said during a community meeting in Three Rivers, one of the park’s gateway communities. — Claudia Elliott