 Another day, another storm. Wind, rain and snow battered Southern California this past weekend. We spoke to Assistant Director for Response Dan Bout about the specific challenges that lie ahead and the significant impacts from this past weekend's storms. After five years of drought, basically we had areas that just weren't ready to receive the amount of rainfall it did. And this wasn't just any normal rainstorms. So there were three rainstorms that came back to back starting the middle of last week and ending with the strongest storms over the weekend. And in fact, in many of the areas, Long Beach, Los Angeles Airport, they received record-setting amounts of rain. But when you get rainstorms of this intensity over this brief of a period, you have mud and debris runoffs in those foothill areas. And so that'll start to fill your basins with all kinds of material. And so when you have a back-to-back-to-back storm, those are complicated. But when you get that kind of discharge again, all those materials start building up against some of the pilings and some of those bridges, which then creates all kinds of upstream consequences. And so we had a lot of swiftwater rescues. Our local public safety partners in Riverside County and Los Angeles County were basically having to get people out of their vehicles who decided they thought they could get through the water. It didn't look very deep and they ended up caught in rapidly moving water. Then there was a lot of locations where they had debris and mudslides in areas that had basically suffered a lot of vegetation damage during the drought. So they weren't able to hold that kind of water. And so all kinds of debris rushed down in the canyons. In some areas we had areas like campgrounds and cabins that were completely stripped out from riverbeds and pushed downstream. Now we move to, in some ways, a more difficult portion because it's doing that assessment. What was the baseline before the storm started and what does it look like now? What are the consequences to people, to the environment, to businesses? So once you start uncovering that you realize just how closely knit different aspects of the community are and our partners in recovery who are helping our county partners kind of get an assessment, fortunately they're experts at looking at all those primary consequences and then the second and third order consequences. The State Operations Center is still activated today as the storm lingers in Southern California. But the recovery phase is ongoing and will be long term. For OES News, I'm John Fingadel.