The West Coast is bracing for another massive storm as an 'atmospheric river' - a high-altitude current of dense moisture - is expected to bring drenching rains and renewed flooding to northern and central California, starting on Wednesday.
Heavy snow was also forecast to return to the Sierra Nevada mountains on Wednesday, along with coastal rain and higher-elevation snow in the Pacific Northwest.
Northern California is still recovering from a weekend Pacific storm that triggered floods, mudslides, power outages, and road closures.
This time, the high winds accompanying the latest batch of impending downpours could uproot trees and knock down tree limbs, causing more blackouts.
As many as 10,000 homes and businesses in northern California were without electricity early on Tuesday night, data from poweroutage.us showed.
San Francisco appears to be directly in the firing line and is bracing for the storm to be catastrophic after it was already deluged with floods and mudslides on New Year's Eve.
'This will likely be one of the most impactful systems on a widespread scale that this meteorologist has seen in a long while,' the National Weather Service's Bay Area office said. 'This is truly a brutal system that we are looking at and needs to be taken seriously.
'The impacts will include widespread flooding, roads washing out, hillside collapsing, trees down (potentially full groves), widespread power outages, immediate disruption to commerce, and the worst of all, likely loss of human life.'
The first round of rain is expected to move into the region early on Wednesday morning with the second wave arriving between 2 and 9pm.
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