Residents rescued from flooded northern California neighbourhoods

Rescuers chest-deep in water steered boats full of people, some with babies and pets, on Tuesday from a San Jose, Calif., neighbourhood inundated by water from an overflowing creek.

At least 225 residents were taken to dry land and rinsed with soap and water to prevent them from being sickened by floodwaters that had travelled through engine fuel, garbage, debris and over sewer lines, San Jose Fire Capt. Mitch Matlow said.

Rescuerswent door-to-door searching for people who needed to leave the neighbourhood and only residents who could prove they had been cleaned of the floodwaters were allowed to board buses to shelters.

• Flash flood warnings, evacuation orders issued in northern California

"This is like once-in-a-lifetime," said Bobby Lee, 15, of the water around him.

He was rescued with his brother and parents, who took clothes, electronics and some photos from their home in a neighbourhood that ended up littered with submerged cars.

Earlier Tuesday, firefighters rescued five people stranded by flooding at a homeless camp along the same creek in San Jose.

Firefighters went door-to-door to tell residents to get out of their homes because the city does not have sirens or another emergency warning system, San Jose spokesman David Vossbrink said.

Weather advisories

The rains were the latest produced by a series of storms generated by so-called atmospheric rivers that dump massive quantities of Pacific Ocean water on California after carrying it aloft from as far away as Hawaii.

The latest downpours swelled waterways to flood levels and left about half the state under flood, wind and snow advisories.

In another area of San Jose, the fire department was called to Coyote Creek amid reports of as many as 40 people being stranded at a homeless encampment.

That number turned out to be inaccurate and five people were located and rescued, fire Capt. Mitch Matlow said.

Their condition was not immediately available.

In the Sierra Nevada mountain range, part of Highway 50, one of the main routes to Lake Tahoe, was in danger of collapsing after a roadway shoulder gave way following heavy storms, leaving a gaping hole about 12-metres long and five-metres wide, Caltrans engineer Jarrett Woodruff said.

Crews opened one lane open Tuesday as Caltrans workers tried to fix the road failure after numerous mudslides blocked it for days at a time in recent weeks.

Heavy storms over the last two weeks caused parts of the shoulder and part of one lane on the four-lane highway give way.

In the San Joaquin Valley in California's agricultural heartland, farmers used their tractors and other heavy equipment to help shore up an endangered levee along the San Joaquin River.

Some farmers took their tractors and other equipment to the levee to help shore it up, arriving to fill a big breach within half an hour of noticing the break, said alfalfa farmer Tony Coit.

"The farmers ran it like a boss," he said, using soil from the levee itself to fill in the nine-metre-wide break until they could truck in large rocks for more substantial repairs.

The water level rose at Lake Oroville for the first time since authorities ordered an emergency evacuation of 188,000 people more than a week ago after a damaged spillway caused major flooding concerns.

The rains have saturated the once-drought stricken region and wreaked havoc for residents hit hard by the storms. At least four people have died in the storms throughout the state in the last week.

The current storm system began to weaken Tuesday after dumping more than a half-inch of rain in the San Joaquin Valley, over an inch in San Francisco, and more than 12.7 centimetres in the mountains above Big Sur over the previous 24 hours, the National Weather Service reported.

Dry weather was expected to return to the region on Wednesday.