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Iconic dry LA riverbed featured in 'Grease' and 'Terminator 2' flooded with water as storm hits southern California

Thousands of households and businesses were without power in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 25, as storms continued to hit parts of California

CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES: Thousands of households and businesses were without power in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 25, as storms continued to hit parts of California. The storm, which is due to weakening, is one of the strongest to hit the state that also brought flooding at the iconic bone-dry Los Angeles River, which featured in movies like ‘Grease’ and 'Terminator 2', after days of intense rainfall.

The river's runoff has led to street flooding across the City of Angels, including at Hollywood Burbank Airport, Studio City, and Laurel Canyon Boulevard, according to Daily Mail. The flooding has also closed the 5 Freeway. However, four cars and a pickup truck were stranded in the water, according to ABC 7. But drivers and passengers were able to get out of the vehicles, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department. So far, no reports of missing persons or injuries have been reported.

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NWS warns of heavy rains and thunderstorms

The National Weather Service (NWS) in its bulletin just after 8 pm GMT on Saturday, February 25, warned of heavy rains and thunderstorms over Southern California. It said, as quoted by BBC, "As the front moves inland, snow will move over the Northern Intermountain Region and into Northern California on Sunday morning [February 26]."

Los Angeles County officials shut down 24 miles of beach from Nicholas Canyon in Malibu to White Point Beach in San Pedro for nearly two hours on the afternoon of February 25 after lightning was observed on the shoreline, according to county lifeguards.

'A rare case of cold, significant storm event'

The next storm, expected to hit on Sunday, February 26, 2023, will bring wind gusts of up to 50 mph in the Sacramento Valley, and up to 70 mph in the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains, according to Reuters. Talking about the weather in Southern California, Bryan Jackson, a forecaster at the NWS Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, said, "This is a rare case of a cold, significant storm event."He added that a low-pressure system driven from the Arctic was responsible for such conditions.

Meanwhile, Adam Rosen, a National Weather Service meteorologist in San Diego, said  “In the future, these can definitely happen. But they don’t happen very often. This was an anomalous event here,” reports NBC.

Eric Boldt, a warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in southern California, said, as quoted by The Guardian, "It is definitely the strongest storm we have had in many year," he added.

Greg Pierce, co-director and senior researcher at UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation, explained, “It is definitely an outlier – and we are seeing more of those due to climate change."