Vehicles are stuck on a road after being trapped by a mudslide on California Highway 58 in Mojave, California, October 16, 2015, after torrential rains swamped the area and forced drivers and passengers to flee on foot.
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Drainage systems also needed to be cleared along an 8-mile stretch of the highway about 80 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, said Florene Trainor, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Transportation.
Caltrans says it could reopen the highway later this week.
Landslides trapped dozens of cars, buses, RVs and big-rig trucks during last week’s thunderstorms.
Kerjon Lee, a spokesman for Los Angeles County Public Works, says 50 field personnel and more than 30 pieces of heavy equipment are on the ground in the areas of Elizabeth Lake and Lake Hughes, about 40 miles north of Los Angeles. Hundreds of cars got stuck on Interstate 5.
All but a handful have been pulled free and the work continues.
The National Weather Service said a flash flood watch would be in effect again Friday afternoon and early evening for the mountains and deserts because of the continuing threat of severe and slow-moving thunderstorms, which raises the potential for flash floods and debris flows. “This mobile was right over here behind that tree”, said Steve Lopez, gesturing to an area that was hundreds of feet away from the home’s current location. A mile-long stretch of State Route 58 will remain closed this week following a deluge that left almost 200 cars and 300 people stranded, CBS News reported Sunday.
He said in that area alone, crews need to clear out 20,000 dump trucks worth of dirt, which could take months.
She said the two homes on the land seemed like they were OK, but that one of the homes was without water because of an inundated pump, and their 20-foot trailer is nowhere in sight. Rainfall reached 1.45 inches in a short span of time during the sudden flash floods. “She started screaming. ‘Dad, dad we’re going to die!'”
Most of the storms California has been seeing are small, intense cells, while El Nino is likely to bring more widespread events, said Bill Croyle, deputy director of statewide emergency preparedness and security for the California Department of Water Resources.
Clean up on the Interstate began later Thursday and continued into the night.
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“It either got buried or it’s downriver”, Hartle said.
