President Joe Biden visited a seaside town on the Central California coast Thursday when he toured areas damaged by a series of powerful winter storms in California.
The January storms have left at least 20 dead and caused destruction, including flooding and mudslides, in 41 of the state’s 58 counties.
“The country is here for you and with you,” Biden said after touring the damage at the Capitola pier. “We are not leaving until things are built back and built back better than they were before.”
The president, accompanied by FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state and local officials, visited the storm-damaged Capitola Pier in Santa Cruz County, where he met with business owners and affected residents. The wharf could be closed for a year due to damage from the storms.
Get top local stories in Southern California delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC LA's News Headlines newsletter.
The president took a helicopter to survey storm-ravaged areas in the Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties. Biden met with business owners and residents impacted by the floods and spoke with first responders, alongside Governor Gavin Newsom and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Deanne Criswell.
“We had nine atmospheric rivers, a stacking of stress, this conveyor belt going back 22 days, trillions of gallons,” Newsom said at a news conference.
Biden arrived in Santa Clara County around midday in California aboard Air Force One.
"If anybody doubts that the climate is changing, then they must have been asleep for the last couple of years,” Biden said at the news conference.
Biden also met with first responders and deliver remarks on supporting the state’s recovery at nearby Seacliff State Park.
“Over 500 FEMA and other federal personnel have already deployed to California to support response and recovery operations and are working side by side with the state to ensure all needs are indeed met on the ground,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday.
Biden has already approved a major disaster declaration for the state, freeing up additional federal resources for recovery efforts. Hours ahead of the visit, he raised the level of federal assistance available even higher.
From Dec. 26 to Jan. 17, the entire state of California averaged 11.47 inches of rain and snow, according to the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center, with some reports of up to 15 feet of snow falling over the three-week period in the highest elevations of the Sierra Nevada.
California gets much of its rain and snow in the winter from a weather phenomenon known as “atmospheric rivers” — long, narrow bands of water vapor that form over the ocean and flow through the sky.
California has been hit by nine atmospheric rivers since late December. The storms have relented in recent days, although forecasters were calling for light rain toward the end of this week followed by a dry period.
The storms have brought much-needed rain and mountain snow to the drought-stricken state. Extreme drought was wiped out in California after a series of winter storms, boosting the state's vital snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, according to this week's U.S. Drought Monitor report.
Associated Press writers Seth Borenstein in Washington and Adam Beam in Sacramento, California, contributed to this report.
