portions of the state. just minutes ago we were seeing this video of a levy that failed overnight in monterey county. that has forced evacuations, washed out roads and bridges. this week s atmospheric river, the tenth to hit the state dropped more than a foot of rain in some areas. at least two people have died in the most recent storm and more rain is on the way for some hard-hit areas. several feet of snow is blanketing the sierra, nevada mountains. they worry melting snow could cause more flooding. california national guard in high water vehicles are staged throughout the state. mike lareo is in vallaero. reporter: we re in the heart of the flood zone and we have all of this flooding in the downtown area because from that video you just saw, the levy is about 3 miles behind us and as soon as that levy had a breach around midnight local time, jim, all of that water had nowhere to go but here except for low lying areas. you can see there s a little bit of a dry spot in our
it s especially bad in new york. just talked to a passenger on a flight from new orleans into newark. he said you could smell the smoke in the plane as the flight descended into newark. you could see that thick red smoke, he said it was almost apocalyptic. the ground stop at newark and laguardia, both of them have been lift. at newark, there lifted. at newark, there is a ground delay meaning flights held at the departing airport up to two hours now. at laguardia, about 45 minutes. so things are improving a little bit, although we are not out of the woods just yet. we see during days when there are major delays like this a bit of a domino effect, and so this could mean that this wildfire smoke having an impact on the east coast could have a nationwide impact on commercial air tramp. just checked flight aware, we just crossed 2,000 delays nationwide. the good news right now, though,
train them to the proper professional standard and get them integrated into the operation. it s not terribly surprising that after such global interruption in air tramp, that it s taken some time to recover. i think we re feeling all of these stresses and strains now. all the stressors that we feel in our everyday lives, of course, we take on our airplanes with us. i think it s just an indication of how in recent times, i m trying not to sound like my grandfather, but it seems to be in our society a less good agreement on what appropriate behavior is and how we should feel an obligation to be civil, at least for civil outbursts to get to our destination safely and securely. that was a question i was going to get to our conversation and whether or not covid is playing a role in all of this. i feel like we need public service announcements or something from the industry, from the transportation industry