In Los Angeles there is a growing feeling that 'historical' is returning to normal

Californians have long joked that their state has three seasons: wildfires, earthquakes and floods. But when an atmospheric river parked itself over Los Angeles this week, knocking out power and dumping record rain, it was a serious deal.

“The weather seems more extreme on every level,” Fred Rosen, a retired entertainment executive, said Monday, crouching in the lobby of the nearby Hotel Bel-Air as mudslides threatened his neighborhood. “But where are you going?”

The brutal weather system has battered Southern California from Santa Barbara to San Bernardino since Sunday, and authorities have reported more than 380 mudslides so far in Los Angeles alone. Rescuers pulled dozens of people from the raging waters and homeless people filled shelters.

It has always rained in the winter in Los Angeles, no matter what the song says otherwise. But the succession of extreme weather events — a storm surge a year ago, Tropical Storm Hilary in August and now this marathon of atmospheric rivers — has Angelenos thinking that such “historic” events might not be so historic anymore in a climate era. change.

In the Baldwin Hills neighborhood, mud seeped onto a road, trapping several cars and blocking traffic after they were pushed past a barrier a resident installed in a futile attempt to reverse nature. Nearby, a pile of dirt had blown through a bedroom wall, a disturbing scene that Mayor Karen Bass herself investigated.

A similar shift had occurred last winter during a storm, Lorious Presley said as he surveyed the damage to the neighborhood under a red umbrella. That provided him with a valuable lesson: park in a new spot. His own car was spared, but others were not so lucky.

“There's been nothing like it in the last two years,” Mr. Presley said.

Katy Yaroslavsky, the city council member representing West Los Angeles, agreed. Parts of her district received almost as much rain on Sunday and Monday as in an average year.

“People say this is the new normal, but like the rest of the world, even that has changed here,” said the council member, whose district includes about 260,000 Angelenos. “I don't even know what to call this. The new 'new normal'? What does 'normal' even mean?”

At the Beverly Glen Deli, nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains, Paul Mudra, 58, called the storm “a little worrisome,” but nothing terrible for those used to living under the threat of wildfires and earthquakes. “In a way, the rains are just another natural disaster we have to deal with,” his husband, Thilo Huebner, 50, added.

Laurence Homolka, 79, a retired violin teacher who has lived in the mudslide-prone Pacific Palisades neighborhood for the past two decades, wondered over an afternoon coffee at Starbucks whether growing attention to climate change had simply made Californians “more catastrophic-minded.” ” When he was four, he said, it once rained for days and “no one thought anything about it.”

“Today we have developed a lot of terminology. We say it's catastrophic, which, I think, sometimes it is,” he said. “We cannot agree with what is actually happening.”

Last week, Los Angeles officials and National Weather Service meteorologists issued stern language warnings for residents to stay off the roads if possible and to evacuate when instructed. Los Angeles officials were surprised Tuesday that no one had been killed in the city yet.

As the storm moved into Southern California on Sunday, the entertainment world was riveted by the Grammy Awards in downtown Los Angeles, no matter how dire Mayor Bass' warnings were to stay home. At the Crypto.com Arena, the only indication that the weather was a nuisance came when Miley Cyrus, with only slightly tousled hair, said she almost missed her award for best pop solo performance because traffic was blocked by rain .

Yet within hours, much of Los Angeles turned into a mud bath. In the San Fernando Valley, more than a hundred homeless people were evacuated from a small village. In Studio City, on Lockridge Road, a street tucked into the bottom of a steep hill, shocked residents in galoshes wandered through rushing water on roads covered in wet dirt and cobblestones. Household items stuck through the mud: bedding, bits of plastic, stray shoes.

In several ways, the same storm had more brutal consequences in Northern California, as fierce winds toppled hundreds of trees on Sunday, killing three people and cutting power to more than 800,000 homes.

In Southern California, where the vast expanses range from rugged terrain to neat subdivisions, geography alone can exempt entire swathes from the worst of the extreme storms. Weather that is widely believed to be dangerous and life-threatening can be experienced differently depending on where you sit.

On Monday morning, Cecily Kim Oh, 51, received the urgent warnings to stay off the streets, only to see that they fell short of the smooth route to her children's school in North Hollywood promised on Google Maps. There were no major backups on Highway 101, nor were any intersections marked as closed.

Ms. Oh has lived in Los Angeles for 15 years and has no complaints about the rain. “Even though the weather is cold, I'm still barefoot,” she said with a laugh, lifting her foot off the pedal box of her Jeep as she waited outside Walter Reed Middle School.

More than 60 miles south, in a canyon of Orange County, a similar feeling played out at the Trabuco General Store, in an area under a voluntary evacuation warning. Greeting customers was Zac Schraff, 28, an employee who said he grew up in the neighborhood and went to school across the street. Weather conditions had apparently deteriorated over the years, but he said he welcomed the storm.

“Rain can only be positive for us. We are in a drought. I am more afraid of the fires,” Mr. Schraff said. But he often thinks about the fateful cycle in which rain feeds vegetation that could become the fuel for future fires.

Outside the store, Eliceo Marquisa, 58, pointed to a waterway about three feet high and sneered: “That's nothing,” he said.

He remembered a storm about ten years ago when the water rose much higher. Mr. Marquisa, who has lived in Trabuco Canyon for 15 years, said he had grown accustomed to the severe weather and had no plans to ever leave.

The rain made rich and poor vulnerable to the devastation. Some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods were in the affluent and saturated Santa Monica Mountains and Hollywood Hills.

In Bel Air, an intensely private enclave in West Los Angeles that is home to the likes of Lady Gaga and Ronald Reagan, several people said the storm was a rude awakening. By late Monday afternoon, multimillion-dollar homes supported by strong retaining walls and surrounded by security hedges were drenched in a staggering 14 inches of rain, the Weather Service said.

At the Hotel Bel-Air, the Swan Lake Cave, a famous wedding venue, was a river of brown water.

“It was an absolute disaster,” said Mahin White, 78, who has lived in Bel Air for 43 years and said she was living at the hotel while her home was being renovated. “There were no swans in there, thank God.”

Kyle Armantrout, 51, said when the ground outside his five-bedroom home started rumbling Sunday, he thought it was an earthquake. Then he checked his security cameras, he said, and realized the hill across the street had collapsed into his and his neighbor's front yard.

The debris had further damaged his neighbor's home, destroying a fence and breaking open a garage door, Mr. Armantrout said. But something grim about the event has unnerved him.

“We had almost half a meter of rain in 24 hours,” he said. “You'd think it would be intense, but it's just so steady. Constant. That's the part that makes you think, “What if it doesn't stop?”

Rachel Parsons, Vik Jolly And Colleen Hagerty contributed from Los Angeles, and Rebecca Shin from Orange County, California.