A 2-and-a-half-year-old boy has died during a California storm, when a tree fell on his parents’ mobile home on Wednesday.
Authorities said a redwood tree had fallen on the double wide mobile home with the infant and his parents inside, in Occidental, California, during the storm.
Occidental is a small community about 70 miles northwest of San Francisco.
According to Occidental Fire Chief Ron Lunardi, cited by ABC News, hurricane-force winds were hitting parts of California as part of a so-called bomb cyclone, or a combination of hot and cold air masses that worsens the impact of a weather system.
“One of our major incidents we’ve had involved a redwood tree falling on a house … and we had a fatality up there of a minor—infant, actually. A one- to two-year-old infant,” Lunardi said.
The parents of the child were not injured.
“When I first arrived on scene, a frantic father came out of the house holding the child. He was kind of covered in debris and he said my child is not breathing,” Lunardi said.
“We are in a rural location out here so my first thought was get him into my truck and let’s get him out to the main road because he is on a long dirt driveway. I got the father into the truck.
“As I was backing up down the driveway in reverse I was giving him instructions to breathe his child for him and as we did we got back out to the main road where I met the rescue squad and they immediately grabbed the child from the father and started CPR and waited for the paramedics to get there.
“Any time you have a situation like this, especially with a child, everybody’s emotions are a lot higher,” Lunardi said.
Adverse Weather in California
The new round of severe weather comes just days after another storm hit Northern California, causing two levees to fail near Sacramento and flooding throughout the region.
The state was bracing for a series of strong weather systems in Northern California expected to bring heavy rains and flooding throughout the area starting Wednesday and continuing for the rest of the week.
According to the the National Weather Service in San Francisco, “impacts [for Wednesday and Thursday] will include widespread flooding, roads washing out, hillside collapsing, trees down (potentially full groves), widespread power outages, immediate disruption to commerce and the worst of all, likely loss of human life,” it said.
The heaviest precipitation is expected in Northern California Wednesday evening into Thursday morning, extending into Thursday night in Southern California. The effects of residual flooding could last into the weekend, with additional storms lingering into next week.
Epoch Times reporters Caden Pearson and Jack Phillips contributed to this report.
