At least 9 dead as tornadoes rip across Southeast

Geoff Bennett:

Good evening, and welcome to the "NewsHour."

Rescue crews in Alabama and Georgia have spent this day looking for survivors and victims after tornadoes tore through the region last night. At least nine people died, seven of them in Alabama.

Amna Nawaz:

The storms also left widespread wreckage and knocked out power to tens of thousands of people. Following a long night, the damage began coming into sharper focus after daybreak.

In Selma, Alabama, this morning, evidence of a tornado's power on vivid display. The twister ripped away parts of the Selma Country Club.

Ray Hogg, Selma Resident:

You could hear the roar, glass going everywhere. You could hear the roof literally being torn off right over our heads.

Speaker:

Oh, my God.

Amna Nawaz:

Social media video showed the storm carving a ragged path of destruction across the city etched into America's civil rights history. It hurled aside cars and wrecked buildings.

But Selma's mayor said last night that the damage could have been even worse.

James Perkins, Mayor of Selma, Alabama: We were blessed. We dodged some major bullets. I just want to remind folks that Selma is just one of the communities that was hit by this storm.

Amna Nawaz:

The hardest hit of those communities lay 40 miles to the northeast in Autauga County, where all of the state's tornado deaths occurred, and in Hale County, where authorities say around 50 homes have been destroyed. That number is only expected to rise as the full scale of the damage is assessed.

Doris Hill's home and business are among the wreckage.

Doris Hill, Hale County Resident:

I just — we moved from their house in September. Their house gone. Ain't nothing left on their house but stilts.

Amna Nawaz:

All told, the Federal Emergency Management Agency estimated that tornadoes may have touched down at least 35 times across several Southern states.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Californians continue cleaning up from days of relentless rainstorms, while bracing for yet another system moving in from the Pacific. Local officials in Monterey County, located in the central part of the state, are watching the Salinas River, now at risk of overflowing.

Nearby communities are under evacuation orders, but some residents are opting to wait it out.

Diane Souza, Spreckels Resident:

We have sandbagged the garage. Our house is up off the ground, so we really didn't need to do much of sandbagging of that.

Amna Nawaz:

So far, more than half of California's 58 counties have been declared disaster areas, and property damage could top $1 billion.

And despite the amount of rainfall, the drought that has gripped the Western U.S. is far from over.

For more on that I'm joined by Jeffrey Mount, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California's Water Policy Center. That's a nonpartisan think tank focusing on innovative water management solutions.

Jeffrey Mount, welcome to the "NewsHour."

As you well know, California has been enduring a devastating multiyear drought. Many people will see the downpours over the last several days and think, well, surely that drought is over. Is that the case?

Jeffrey Mount, Public Policy Institute of California: Well, drought is in the eye of the beholder.

This is really something important. It's kind of missed in the news. If you — if you're in San Francisco, and you rely on your reservoirs for your water supply, the drought is over for you. They're going to fill up this year.

But if you rely on groundwater around the Central Valley or anywhere in the state, it takes years to rebuild the losses in groundwater we have had over the last three years, really over the last 10 years. So, no.

And I got to add, if you're a fish, this is great. But you're not going to rebound. It's going to take years of rain to actually recover from this long series, this last 10 years of dry conditions.

Amna Nawaz:

Does any of this, the relentless rains we have been seeing, does it help that problem at all, help to build back some of that storage?

Jeffrey Mount:

Yes, let me be clear. We are pointed in the right direction. We just haven't arrived yet.

It really would take years, like we had in the late '90s here in California. We had a spell of wet years, five consecutive wet years. That really helps a lot. But one year does not get us out of the drought completely.

Amna Nawaz:

Is this rain being stored in some way that can make a difference towards the future, though?

Jeffrey Mount:

Oh, yes, absolutely.

I mean, right now, you have got to appreciate there's more than 1,500 dams in California. So our reservoirs are filling up. Our largest reservoirs are a long way from being full, which is kind of a silver lining from the drought, because they're so — they're taking all the water in. And that's actually reducing flood risk downstream, as they fill those reservoirs.

But they will — they will, in all likelihood, fill this year. So, yes, we're storing a lot in our surface areas. And we're recharging groundwater, which is important.

Amna Nawaz:

When you take a broader view of these several days of severe rainstorms that we have seen and another storm system moving in, we have to point out as well, do you see this as a blip, or is this the new normal for you?

Jeffrey Mount:

OK, so one of the issues that has come up about climate change, it's no longer an existential future threat in California. It's here. And we're seeing it.

And what we're seeing is drier dry years and wetter wet years. So, this — you can't attribute this, what's happening right now, to climate change, but it is consistent with what we're seeing. And that is, these atmospheric rivers get juiced up by the warm air out in the Pacific, because they're just holding more water as they come in.

And so this is what all our predictions are like. This is what the future probably looks like. And, in fact, I would argue the future is here. It's here now.

Amna Nawaz:

Well, obviously, we have seen the storms having an enormous impact on the ground. We see challenges still ahead with the drought, as you laid out.

You live in California, right? What does all this mean for how you, people in your community live?

Jeffrey Mount:

First of all, as you know, we just — we have the most variable climate in all of North America here in California when it comes to precipitation. Most people don't appreciate that.

We — and so people run around like it's some exotic event when it rains, but it does. It rains here. And it rains like this about once every 10 years. So what happens in all of this, we get very excited about it, and we worry about it, and then we forget about it by the time the summer comes around.

But, this year, enough flood damage will have occurred that I'm hopeful we will tackle that issue, instead of just looking at drought. We have to do them side by side. You have to do — you have to handle the wet years better while you're handling the dry years better.

So, to our credit as a state, we're working in that direction.

Amna Nawaz:

Is that to say that you do see the right institutional and policy changes being put into place to meet the challenges of both those wetter wet years and the dryer dry years?

Jeffrey Mount:

Yes, well, I'm at the Public Policy Institute of California. What do we do?

We make recommendations on policy. So there's a lot more that we can do. But I can safely say, after looking at this for more than 25 years, we are pointed in the right direction our policy changes. We still have a lot of work ahead of us though.

Amna Nawaz:

Jeffrey Mount, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California's Water Policy Center, thank you for joining us.

Jeffrey Mount:

My pleasure.