Gov. Brown seeks disaster declaration for California flooding

LOS ANGELES - California Gov. Jerry Brown asked President Trump on Friday to declare a major disaster in the state because of damage from a month of storms as more rain hit the south.

Brown’s letter said a powerful series of January storms brought “relentless” rain and high winds that caused flooding, mudslides, evacuations, erosion, power outages and at least eight deaths. Northern California was hardest hit.

Brown said the storm system was so severe and widespread that state and local governments need federal assistance to continue dealing with the problems it created.

In a separate action, the governor added Amador, Mono and Riverside to the 49 counties included in ?an emergency proclamation Brown issued last month.

A so-called atmospheric river weather system continued to pummel the upper two-thirds of the state this week but it weakened as it moved south down the coast on Friday.

Mudslides and rock slides temporarily closed two major highways from Nevada to Lake Tahoe and restricted travel on U.S. Interstate 80 over the Sierra Nevada near Truckee.

Interstate 80 was closed by a mudslide at Baxter, sending traffic in both directions onto detours on Highways 49 and 20.

Nevada transportations officials reopened the Mount Rose Highway from Reno to Tahoe and the Kingsbury Grade from the Carson Valley to Tahoe after they had been closed because of debris on the road.

U.S. Highway 50 remained shut down on the lake’s east shore near Cave Rock where several huge boulders have fallen.

Thanks to a wet winter, downtown Los Angeles already has recorded ?15.7 inches of rain since the Oct. 1 start of the water year, exceeding its annual rainfall total with the season far from over.

In Butte County, workers scrambled to rescue millions of baby salmon from a hatchery being buried in mud from the crumbling spillway of the Lake Oroville Dam. The fish were evacuated by tanker trucks.

Damage to the spillway could approach $100 million, officials said.

On Friday, state officials said they may be able to avoid emergency releases from the rain-choked reservoir by further sacrificing the concrete spillway.

“Basically it’s going to be a triage situation. We know we’re going to have erosion going on but it’s in the best interest of the lake right now to be able to keep using the spillway to evacuate water,” California Department of Water Resources spokesman Eric See.