As damage estimates ranging from $17 million in one neighborhood to $60 million in a farm area started to roll in, many victims of the California flooding and mudslides faced the prospect of not being able to spend Christmas at home.
The storm's push across the West left a muddy mess across Southern California and the threat of avalanches in Nevada, where Clark County officials urged residents of Mount Charleston, near Las Vegas, to leave after snow slides near two mountain hamlets.
The inland region of Southern California east of Los Angeles was emerging as among the hardest-hit areas, especially San Bernardino County, where a sea of mud destroyed five homes and damaged 70 in the community of Highland.
People were literally chased from their homes by walls of mud and water in Highland, leaving behind dwellings strung with holiday lights.
They returned Thursday to find some homes with Christmas presents under the tree, inundated with mud several feet deep.
Leslie Constante burst into tears when she approached her parents' house and saw a red tag slapped on the garage, meaning authorities had deemed it unsafe to enter. Out front, a display with two holiday reindeer was enveloped in mud several feet deep.
"My mom and dad worked so hard for this," said Constante, wearing knee high rubber boots and a rain jacket. The 29-year-old pharmacy technician couldn't get inside to see how bad the damage was to Christmas presents and other belongings.
Ibeth Garcia and her family returned to a home surrounded by mud 4 feet deep to retrieve Christmas presents and clothes left behind when they fled a dirty torrent.
"We left with just our shoes, cell phones and car keys," said Garcia, 26. "We didn't have time for anything else."
They found just a light coating of mud inside the house and considered themselves lucky, as some of their neighbors' homes were uninhabitable.
Highland officials estimated the storm caused $17.2 million damage to homes, cars and a bridge that was washed away.
As residents surveyed their homes, work crews were busy trying to reopen more than a dozen canyon and mountain roads that were closed by slides and floods. Reopening times were listed simply as "unknown" for most of them.
"There's a lot of road damage," said San Bernardino County fire spokeswoman Tracey Martinez. "The whole county received quite a bit of damage."
In neighboring Riverside County, the damage estimate was nearing $30 million.
Numerous motorists were rescued from swamped cars during the days of rain, but one driver was killed. The body of Angela Wright, 39, was recovered from a car that was swept off a flooded road Wednesday in Riverside County.
While the rain had given way to only partly cloudy skies Thursday, the danger was not over for foothill residents living below wildfire-scarred hillsides. The National Weather Service is reporting that less-intense rain is likely to resume on Sunday and could hit Los Angeles again as early as Christmas Day.
"The ground is so saturated it could move at any time" and the threat will remain for several weeks, said Bob Spencer, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works.
that the town of Green Valley Lake, population 800, in the San Bernardino Mountains had been effectively cut off by flooding and rock slides, with California Highways 18 and 330 both closed.
More than 200 homes were ordered evacuated for more than 24 hours in La Canada-Flintridge and La Crescenta, suburbs of Los Angeles below steep hillsides that burned in 2009 and where mudslides inundated homes and backyards in February. Evacuations ended Wednesday night.
Sewers overflow into bays
Despite the return of sunshine Thursday, officials said Californians may want to resist the urge to head to the ocean.
The rain washed trash, pesticides and bacteria into waterways and prompted health warnings. Four beaches were closed in Northern California's San Mateo County, and another 12 miles of beach from Laguna Beach to San Clemente in Southern California's Orange County were off-limits because of sewer overflows.
"It can be very nice the next day and everyone says 'This is great! This is a beach day,'" said Jonathan Fielding, director of the Los Angeles county public health department. "It could well be but we will be monitoring and testing water and we won't recommend people go back there until we're sure it's safe."
Experts normally recommend waiting 72 hours after a storm before getting in the water, though in this case some are saying five days might be wiser. The contamination in some areas could last for weeks because of the especially heavy rains.
Mark Gold, president of Heal the Bay, a Santa Monica-based group that monitors and grades beach water quality, said rain causes more pollution to get flushed into the region's system of storm drains, channels and rivers that carry runoff to the sea.
"Literally every beach gets an 'F' when we get a rain storm like this," he said. "It's big enough to pollute each and every beach in LA County. It's a pretty extraordinary event when we have rain like this."
Curtis Duran, 45 and his two children Max and Ava strolled the trash-strewn beach in Long Beach on Thursday and surveyed debris carried down to the shoreline by the Los Angeles River.
Cans, baseballs, plastic bottles and even baby's high chair sat on the sand mixed in with piles of discarded wood and shards of plastic. Ava, 5, picked up a deflated red ball and showed it to her dad.
"We come down here all the time and I've never seen so much," said Curtis Duran.
Orange County and San Diego were also hard hit.
Sixty people were rescued and more than 30 homes evacuated Wednesday when water surged through Dove Canyon, a gated Orange County community.
In San Diego, the first floor of the Premier Inn in the city's Mission Valley flooded, forcing guests to the second floor where lifeguards were sent to rescue them, police said. SeaWorld San Diego closed for the day as waters rose in the nearby San Diego River, but it was expected to reopen on Thursday.
Heavy rain severely eroded soil under train tracks in northern San Diego, canceling Amtrak and commuter rail service at least through Christmas weekend.
Farther north, in the Central Valley agricultural region, Tulare County officials said farms and dairies had been hard hit by flooding. About 300 homes were damaged, and 25 roads remained closed.
Allison Lambert, information officer for health and human services, said some preliminary damage estimates ranged beyond $60 million.
About 25 homes sustained damage in Kern County at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, and a highway through the Kern River canyon was expected to remain closed through the end of the year after "truck-sized rocks" were washed onto it, fire spokesman Sean Collins said.
The storm weakened as it moved eastward, but floods still washed away six vacant homes and damaged nearly two dozen others in the Beaver Dam area of northwest Arizona, and inundated parts of Nevada and Utah. The low-pressure system could reach the Gulf Coast by Saturday with some rain, forecasters said.
