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Ammon News - After years of drought, California is being hit by floods as waves of storms roll in from the Pacific, killing at least 14 people, closing motorways up and down the state and sending residents fleeing for their lives.

Montecito, the seaside community that is home to Prince Harry and Meghan Markel, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres and other celebrities was ordered to evacuate on the fifth anniversary of deadly mudslides there.

Flights out of Los Angeles International Airport have been grounded until high winds subside.

A seven-hour search for a missing five-year-old boy swept away by floodwaters turned up only his shoe. Officials called off the search because water levels were too dangerous for divers. However, the boy has not been declared dead, according to San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office.

The boy’s mother was driving a truck when it became stranded in floodwaters near Paso Robles, a small inland city. Although bystanders were able to pull the mother out, the boy was swept out of the vehicle and downstream, likely into a river, officials said.

The series of storms since the end of December is one of the biggest tests yet for disaster-weary California, which has endured wildfires and extreme heat in recent years fuelled by global warming.

“California is experiencing coincidentally a drought emergency and a flood emergency,” said Department of Water Resources Director Karla Nemeth on Monday.

Highway 1, the route to the state’s renowned coastal area of Big Sur, was closed following a mudslide, according to the California Department of Transportation. Parts of Highway 101 and Interstate 505 were also shut.

These are just a few of several major thoroughfares and small country roads closed because of flooding, from the state capital Sacramento in the north to Los Angeles-area beach towns in the south.

By Monday afternoon the state had opened a dozen emergency shelters for those told to evacuate, including in Santa Cruz County, about 121 kilometres south of San Francisco, where the San Lorenzo River rose 5.4 metres since Sunday. Levels on the river have peaked but there will be another round of intense rain, said Daniel Swain, a climatologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

On Sunday, Sacramento County told about 3,300 people in the Central Valley town of Wilton to evacuate due to the risk of flooding if levies overflow.

Five rivers are being monitored for flooding. These include the Cosumnes River in Sacramento County and the Russian River in Napa and Mendocino counties in Northern California, according to Jeremy Arrich, flood management manager of the Department of Water Resources.

Heavy rain started falling on Sunday night in many regions, and by Monday night about 100,000 people were without power, according to PowerOutage.us. That was down from more than 500,000 on Sunday after an earlier storm at the weekend.

The new storm could dump 5cm to 13cm of rain in some areas and up to 1.2 metres of snow in the Sierra Nevada, a mountain range in eastern California, said Ashton Robinson Cook, a forecaster with the US Weather Prediction Centre. Wind gusts may reach upwards of 80kph in many places.

Avalanche warnings have been posted in a number of areas across the Sierra Nevada. These will last until Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service.

“Any steep slopes could be dangerous,” it added.

The storm is another in a series of atmospheric river events — long streams of moisture that can stretch for thousands of kilometres across the Pacific. These can deliver as much water as flows through the mouth of the Mississippi when they release rain on California’s mountains.

The storms already have caused more than $1 billion in losses and damages, according to an estimate by AccuWeather.

Although the precipitation might slacken in northern areas overnight, another round of rain will arrive from the Pacific on Tuesday, said Richard Bann, a forecaster with the US Weather Prediction Centre.

It will not be as severe as Monday’s deluge but with the ground so heavily saturated it will not take much to cause problems.