Young Boy Swept Away in California Flooding

Rescuers have reportedly called off a search for a five-year-old boy who was swept away in flood waters in San Luis Obispo County, as California was hit by a fresh wave of storms from the Pacific.

According to the Associated Press, citing local Sheriff's Office spokesperson Tony Cipolla, divers were forced to call off their search on Monday afternoon after around seven hours as conditions became too unsafe. The boy has not been declared dead, Cipolla said, but only his shoe was found during the search.

Tom Swanson, assistant chief of the San Luis Obispo County Fire Department, told the news agency that the boy's mother had been driving a truck when it became stranded in floodwaters just before 8am, near Paso Robles. Nearby members of the public were able to extract the mother, but the boy was dragged out of the vehicle downstream.

The Sheriff's Office has been contacted for comment.

The central Californian county is one of several coastal areas to be hard-hit by the latest wave of storms to batter the state; evacuation orders are in place for Montecito and other communities.

On the coast and in the valleys, as much as three inches of rain has been dropped since Monday afternoon, the National Weather Service (NWS) has said, with up to seven inches in mountainous regions.

Local officials are expecting another few inches of rain on Tuesday, with rivers and creeks already bursting their banks after Monday's onslaught.

In an update on the situation in San Luis Obispo, Wade Horton, a county administrative officer, said: "Virtually every community is having flooding, evacuations, and road closures."

He noted that one woman had died after driving into a flooded road on Avila Beach, on the San Luis Obispo Bay.

California is forecast to be hit by what the NWS described on Sunday as a "relentless parade of cyclones moving across the Pacific," which are expected to combine with the atmospheric river, known as the Pineapple Express, that flows across the Pacific from the subtropics into the state.

The mixing of the warm, moist air from the atmospheric river and the colder air brought by the cyclones from the Arctic has been attributed to causing the intense rainfall.

The state has faced off-and-on storms since New Year's Eve, when it experienced a first bomb cyclone (named due to a rapid drop in pressure, which is able to bring strong winds and heavy rain) before another hit on January 4.

NWS expects the second wave of a "powerful" storm to hit Los Angeles late on Monday night and into Tuesday, bringing the threat of hail and even small tornadoes.

Flood warnings are in place for much of the coastal region stretching from San Luis Obispo down through Santa Maria and Santa Barbara, with a flash flood warning in place for Los Angeles and Burbank.

On Monday night it said that between two and five inches of rain had fallen on Los Angeles, with rates of between 0.5 and 1 inch an hour expected to continue. "Residents living in or immediately downstream should take immediate precautions to protect life and property," it said.

Just after 11pm ET, Santa Barbara county issued a shelter in place warning due to flooding.

It tweeted earlier that public schools in the county would be closed on Tuesday, and said several highways had been closed due to debris flows and rock slides, as well as Santa Barbara airport.

Parts of Santa Barbara City and Carpentia have had evacuation orders issued, the Santa Barbara County Incident Management Team said in a release on Monday, as well as the entirety of Montecito.

The fire department in Montecito (a coastal town home to celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle) said the order was "due to threats to life safety caused by the ongoing storm."

Update 01/10/23, 11:10 a.m. ET: This article was updated with later information on the search.