(Bloomberg) -- Los Angeles was struck by two tornadoes on Wednesday — one with the strongest winds in 40 years — as California braces for another round of rains and extreme weather next week.
The twisters were spawned by a larger system that brought a bomb cyclone crashing into San Francisco, with tropical-storm strength gusts and widespread flooding. The Los Angeles storms damaged 17 structures across the city.
One of the tornadoes had peak winds of 110 miles per hour, making it an EF-1 on the six-step Enhanced Fujita Scale, making it the strongest twister to strike the region since March 1983, said Marc Chenard, a senior branch forecaster with the US Weather Prediction Center. The other had top winds of 75 mph.
While Los Angeles is known to get high winds, tornadoes are a rare occurrence. The storms are part of a battering of relentless extreme weather across the state, with at least 28 people killed since January and an economic toll that will be measured in billions.
A string of 12 atmospheric rivers flooded the state and dropped record amounts of snow across the Sierra Nevada after three years of drought. As the global climate warms, scientists expect the weather across the US West will become more extreme.
Chenard said California will get a respite from wild weather, but only for a few days. A new system is set to strike on Monday and Tuesday that could bring high winds, rain and snow.
Read more: Battered California Faces Billions in Storm Cleanup Costs
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