Enriqueta Lima stood next to her car in Studio City, holding a puffer jacket over her head as a cold, steady rain fell Monday morning.
Lima, 49, had parked near Fryman Road, a street in a wooded canyon lined with millions of dollars' worth of homes. She cleans a house there and was trying to determine if it was safe to continue driving. She hadn't heard from the owners Sunday night, as the storm moved slowly, so she decided to risk driving to Studio City on Monday after dropping her daughter off at school.
“I got scared thinking about driving here,” Lima said in Spanish. “I don't want to park my car where it's flooded.”
Mud and water ran down the street. She got back into the gray sedan and drove away from it.
Across Southern California, hillside and canyon neighborhoods bore the brunt of the powerful atmospheric river that parked over Los Angeles on Sunday night, just as the Grammys were being awarded at the Crypto.com Arena downtown.
The unprecedented deluge, which prompted a state of emergency declaration by Gov. Gavin Newsom, led to mudslides and evacuations, damage to homes, flooded roads and power outages for thousands of people.
In Northern California, three deaths were blamed on the storm, all from fallen trees, officials said. One was in Santa Cruz County, one in Sutter County and one in Sacramento County.
Still, amid a massive deployment of emergency response teams, broader public safety problems have so far been averted.
“Things have remained the same. “We’re in pretty good shape,” Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said Monday. But, he added, “we're not out of the woods yet.”
Rain will continue to come, intermittently, for most of the week, according to the National Weather Service. And the cleanup has only just begun.
On Monday afternoon in Studio City, yellow trucks from the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services lined Fryman Road, where a landslide had covered the roadway with piles of mud, rocks, tree branches and debris mixed with cutlery. , tools, garden pots and books. The debris field collapsed from Lockridge Road, which is located below the Dearing Mountain Trail in Fryman Canyon Park.
Longtime resident Scott Toro said Sunday night's landslide “sounded like a plane crashing.”
“It sounded like, 'Boom! Boom! Boom!' and we went out and saw all this rubble,” said Toro, 60. “I saw all these rocks.”
Toro left his house after midnight and stayed at a relative's house. He said he's used to water coming down the ravine during storms, but “we've never had anything like this.”
In nearby Beverly Glen, on Caribou Lane, an overturned piano – covered in mud and with bent keys – lay in the street. In that neighborhood, mud flows blew a house off its foundation around 2 a.m. Monday, said Travis Longcore, who lives a few houses down.
“It was a big bang and then a boom,” he said.
The house, according to neighbors, was uninhabited.
The winding residential streets south of Encino Reservoir, covered in tree branches and mud, were mostly deserted Monday. On nearby Boris Drive, the storm washed away the hillside behind Nathan Khalili's rented home, leaving a steep, muddy scar in its place.
“Normally I don't worry about storms, but I didn't think… a landslide would happen,” Khalili, 23, said. “I woke up, looked outside and half the mud had slid down the hill.”
Khalili lost power between midnight and 9 a.m. Monday. His phone, which he sets his morning alarm on, went off overnight. “He's supposed to be at work now himself,” said Khalili, an insurance broker. “But I accidentally fell asleep.”
On the Palos Verdes Peninsula, where a landslide caused several homes to slide into a canyon last summer, residents were cautious as they watched the downpour.
David Zee, whose home in Rolling Hills Estates was red-tagged after neighboring homes on Peartree Lane collapsed, said he went to his home Monday to check for damage. Although his house is in good condition, Zee and his family have been displaced since July. The landslide, according to a city report, was caused by excessive rainfall during a series of severe storms last winter. Now, every time it rains, Zee worries.
“There's not much we can do,” he said. “We just have to hope that our hillside, the foundation on which our house sits, doesn't buckle under the weight of all the rain.”
According to the National Weather Service, a staggering 11.34 inches of rain had fallen in Topanga Canyon by Monday afternoon.
Keith Wilbur, 65, walked down Topanga Canyon Boulevard in rubber rain boots and a plastic poncho. Wilbur was walking home from the Topanga Creek General Store. He said he needed something to drink after he burst his water pipe. His hands and forearms were covered in mud. He had walked about two miles to get to the store and fell in the mud on a closed stretch of Topanga Canyon Boulevard.
“There are cones blocking cars from passing, but I thought I could walk,” he said.
Wilbur lives on the boulevard and said two streams cross on his property. They were both overwhelmed. He said he and his family received an evacuation notice a few days ago, but they didn't want to leave their animals behind.
“I have six peacocks, two dogs and a 400-pound pig,” he said. “How am I supposed to get them all in a car and leave?”
Also wandering the boulevard on foot was a bearded man in a wetsuit, carrying a neon green kayak and a GoPro camera strapped to his chest. He didn't give his name, but he said, a little sheepishly, that he was going to Topanga Creek, which is usually too dry for kayaking.
Nearby, three young men and a young woman were ankle-deep in mud as a plow pushed debris to the side of the road. Each one held a can of White Claw alcoholic mineral water. Among them, Maxwell Stiggants said his driveway was covered in mud and he could not leave his property by vehicle. A neighbor was driving the plow trying to clear the area.
“Do we seem worried?” Stiggants asked, holding his drink and laughing. “It's either this or a fire.”
Staff writers Ashley Ahn, Hannah Fry, Summer Lin and Hannah Wiley contributed to this report.
