Biden to tour California storm areas

When US President Joe Biden visits California on Thursday, he will get a firsthand view of how recent rainstorms have exposed the state's vulnerabilities in preparing for extreme weather events and controlling flood risks.

Accompanied by first responders, state and local officials, Biden will tour storm-devastated communities to "survey recovery efforts, and assess what additional federal support is needed", the White House said in a statement late Monday.

Biden's visit comes as successive thunderstorms pummeled California and some western regions in a three-week period, causing at least 20 deaths in the state. A preliminary estimate by AccuWeather.com puts the total damage and economic loss from the storms between $31 billion and $34 billion.

The train of atmospheric rivers that dumped record rainfall onto California began to fizzle out Monday.

Biden approved a disaster declaration for California on Jan 14 to provide federal assistance. The declaration makes federal funding available for affected individuals in the counties of Merced, Sacramento and Santa Cruz.

As of Tuesday afternoon, 15,850 residents in the Golden State were still without power, according to the utility tracker poweroutage.us.

The storms have raised questions about the state's preparedness to handle extreme weather events, such as flooding.

There is an overdependence on the state's levees and dams. This creates "an exaggerated sense of security" that allows communities to be built closer and closer to bodies of water, according to The New York Times. State officials have a financial incentive to allow such construction, because state laws cap increases in property taxes, so permitting new building of houses is the best way to come up with new tax revenue.

Relying on levees also has another disadvantage. It prevents more rainwater from reaching underground aquifers, which reserve water for use during periods of drought.

"We've cut off the very mechanism by which groundwater recharge used to happen," Joshua Viers, a watershed scientist at the University of California, Merced, told the Times.

In a 2016 blog, researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) said that a large and growing gap exists between flood infrastructure needs and the rates of investment in the state.

"Population growth and new development are increasing the threats to public safety and the economic risk from flooding," researchers said.

Every county has been declared a state or federal flood disaster area multiple times over the past 60 years, PPIC said. In addition, Central Valley levees have failed on more than 70 occasions since the early 1980s. More than 7 million residents and hundreds of billions of dollars in assets are vulnerable to damaging floods.

One in 5 Californians lives in a flood-prone area, according to PPIC. Worsening climate change in recent years has increased the occurrence and intensity of atmospheric rivers, which cause flooding.

"California needs to make infrastructure investments to strengthen flood protection and to take nonstructural measures, such as better land use planning and stronger building codes, to keep people and buildings out of harm's way. The state must also invest in communicating flood risk to improve local decision making," researchers said.

A report released Tuesday by researchers at Pathways Climate Institute LLC in collaboration with the San Francisco Estuary Institute noted that groundwater elevation could corrode foundations, flood basements and increase infiltrations into sewers.

The significance of rising groundwater creates the need for some communities to reevaluate their risks to sea-level rise-driven flooding and to develop effective flood-risk reduction strategies.

"Failing to account for groundwater rise on the landward side of some flood risk reduction structures (e.g., levees and seawalls) could result in maladaptation if the community continues to flood from below," the researchers said.