President Biden To Visit Storm-Battered Santa Cruz and Central Coast on Thursday

As more Santa Cruz County roads and highways get pummeled by waves and reduced to rubble, President Biden will make a Thursday visit to the area to meet first responders, and likely announce more federal disaster relief.

Amateur meteorologists have been casually referring to the last three weeks’ spate of storms as a single atmospheric river, but that is technically not correct. As the Bay Area News Group pointed out Tuesday morning, there have actually been nine atmospheric river storms that have hit northern California and the central coast since Christmas, with at least 20 people having been killed, and more than $1 billion in damage endured.

And now KTVU reports that President Biden will visit Santa Cruz County Thursday to assess storm damage. The exact locations Biden will visit have not yet been revealed, but KTVU says Biden will “visit [the] storm-damaged Santa Cruz coastline,” and adds that he will “go to the Central Coast, evaluate recovery efforts and see what else the federal government can help with.”

“The White House said in a statement Monday that the president would visit with first responders and state and local officials, survey recovery efforts and assess what additional federal support is needed,” according to a report from the Associated Press.

This post is full of embedded images from Santa Cruz’s West Cliff Drive, whose asphalt was busted up by giant waves weeks ago, and the pummeling still has not ceased. "We’ve had so many storms back-to-back-to-back that we’re just – we don’t have enough of a dry period to do some protection in that area," San Jose State University engineering department chair Laura Sullivan-Green told KPIX.

As KTVU points out, last week Biden “signed an emergency declaration for 42 of California's 58 counties," and the money attached to that "will help pay for cleanup, sanitation, and repairs." And as an additional reminder, IRS and the state of California have delayed Tax Day until May 15 this year for filers on storm-affected counties, and San Francisco, Alameda, Marin and San Mateo Counties are among those where we get the deadline extension.

Related: Large Boulder and Rockslide Crash Onto Highway 1 Near Devil's Slide [SFist]

Image: Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies via Wikimedia Commons