Wild Weather Swings Are Robbing California of Its Trees

SACRAMENTO — The coast redwood crashed through the roof and into Nicole Valentine’s bedroom while she was away at a party, trying to ignore the powerful storms that were hammering Northern California with fierce winds and rain. On the phone, her neighbor was almost incoherent.

“She’s like, ‘A tree just fell on your house! I smell gas! I called 911!’” Ms. Valentine, a mother of two and a lawyer in Sacramento, said. “I said, ‘Wait — what?’ Thank goodness no one was at home but our labradoodle, Charlie. My husband ran home immediately.”

In the days since that call on New Year’s Eve, cumulative storms have pummeled California — and Ms. Valentine and her family have huddled in an Airbnb with Charlie, who survived unharmed. As they have tried to schedule insurance adjusters, versions of their terrifying experience have proliferated across the nation’s most populous state.

Stressed by drought, whipped by wind and weakened at the roots by relentless rain and flooding, trees — tall and short, ancient and young, in mountain preserves and suburban yards — have toppled across California this week in breathtaking numbers, the most visible sign of a state veering between environmental extremes.

A procession of atmospheric rivers has interrupted an epic drought responsible for the driest three years on California record. The sudden swing from scarcity to excess with back-to-back storms is testing the state’s infrastructure broadly, straining the power grid, levees, drainage systems and roads from the Pacific Coast to the Sierra Nevada.