Heavy rain and unusually high tides battered much of California on Saturday, causing flooding and mudslides that disrupted travel in some coastal areas and prompted warnings of more to come.
In hard-hit Santa Barbara County, the regional airport was forced to cancel all flights and shut down when floodwaters covered the runways. The authorities also closed portions of two major through routes, Highway 1 and Highway 101, that were blocked by mudslides and flooding.
As conditions worsened during the day, the National Weather Service warned of coastal flooding in the San Francisco Bay Area and flash floods in Southern California, where nearly a month of heavy rainfall has heightened the risk of landslides.
John Feldhans, a spokesman for the Santa Barbara Airport, said the flooding was the worst the airport had seen during the recent spate of storms that has battered the state. He said the airport was not expected to reopen until Sunday.
“As of right now, it’s pretty bad,” Feldhans said.
The storm arrived on a day when the sun, earth and moon were aligned in a way that their gravitational pull combined to create exceptionally high tides known as king tides. In San Francisco, they were expected to crest on Saturday at two and a half feet above the normal level, the highest the city has seen since 1998, according to the National Weather Service.
Combined with the high volume of storm runoff, the king tides swamped coastal areas, especially in the Bay Area, where local news outlets reported significant flooding in several communities.
Winter is typically the wettest time of the year for California, but the past few months have brought exceptional amounts of wind and rain to the state. Before the latest storm, Los Angeles had already recorded nearly 13 inches of rain since Oct. 1 — more than three times the amount it would normally receive in a full year — and the latest storm was expected to add another inch.
The rain was expected to ease on Sunday, with drier weather to follow through the week.
Chris Hippensteel is a reporter covering breaking news and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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