CAPITOLA, Calif. (AP) – President Joe Biden walked Thursday along the battered boardwalk of this postcard-perfect California beach town and listened to business owners struggling to repair damage to their stores after deadly storms wreaked havoc across the region and killed more than 20 people. people across the state.
Biden visited a gutted seafood restaurant and the heavily flooded Paradise Beach Grille, not far from the collapsed Capitola Pier and the pink, orange and teal-painted shops that were boarded up after the storms. The walls were collapsing, debris was strewn everywhere, and the floors were swept away by the raging waters.
Paradise Beach Grille owner Chuck Maier told Biden that water had come up from the ground and flooded his business in Monterey Bay, not far from Santa Cruz. “No joke,” exclaimed Biden.
“You don’t feel it until you walk the streets,” Biden said later from nearby Seacliff State Park, speaking of the severity of the damage and blaming climate change for the severity of the weather. “If anyone doubts that the climate is changing, they must have been asleep for the last two years.”
Flanked by first responders, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell, the president highlighted the damage caused by driving rain, strong winds, flooding and mudslides of land He warned that climate change would create more extreme weather.
“We know that some of the destruction will take years to rebuild,” Biden said. “But we must not only rebuild, but rebuild better.”
From Dec. 26 to Jan. 17, California was inundated by an average of 11.47 inches of rain and snow across the state, according to the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center, with some reports of up to 15 feet of snow in the highest elevations of the Sierra Nevada.
California gets much of its winter rain and snow from a weather phenomenon known as “atmospheric rivers”: long, narrow bands of water vapor that form over the ocean and flow across the sky.
California has been affected by nine atmospheric rivers since late December. The storms have subsided in recent days. Forecasters were calling for light rain later this week followed by a dry spell.
Criswell said Thursday on the trip from Washington that the president and staff need to be aware of what people have been through when they travel to places devastated by storms and other natural disasters.
“There’s been so much trauma in this community and it’s really important that we take that into account,” he said. “These communities have suffered loss of life, loss of their well-being and loss of their livelihoods, and I think it’s incredibly important that they know that the president is here to support them and that the full force of the federal family will be behind them . they.”
Biden has already approved a major disaster declaration for the state, freeing up additional federal resources for recovery efforts. Hours before the visit, he further increased the level of federal assistance available.
More than 500 FEMA and other federal personnel have been deployed to California to support emergency operations. Thousands of spectators gathered for the president’s visit and cheered him as he walked along the boardwalk.
Newsom praised the swift federal response, but warned that the threat remains high in a state that suffered a devastating drought just a few years ago and is now facing record rainfall.
“The scale and scope of this flooding is hard to understand unless you’re out there, and that’s why I couldn’t be more grateful to the president for taking the time to come out again.”
Associated Press writers Colleen Long and Seth Borenstein in Washington and Adam Beam in Sacramento, Calif., contributed to this report.
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