we re really upping the ante especially when we talk about a two day event impacting not only the greatest population densities across the central and northern part of the state but also the southern portions of california. check out these rainfall totals. this is just since the beginning of the year. the radar is quiet now as she was talking about a moment ago in her live hit the calm before the storm but the rain is not far away. more than 30 million people impacted by these flood alerts. check out the gauges. we have the potential for major river flooding as the fire hose of moisture just kind of oscillates from north to south, starting overnight tonight eventually working toward los angeles throughout the day on monday and into tuesday. we will be measuring snowfall in feet across the sierra nevada mountain range. interstate 80 from tahoe through sacramento to san francisco basically impossible in terms of snowfall and the difficult nature of this travel. look at the snowfall total
tornados, it appears, and hurricanes as well. the damage that s being left behind. i ve covered a lot of natural disasters in my career at cnn, and it never ceases to amaze me the sheer power of what mother nature and what wind can do. it completely flipped this vehicle on its side. we have homes that have been completely taken off of their foundation. the mobile home park behind me, we were reporting on it all day long. much of it decimated to the ground to rubble quite literally. talking to survivors who had to do triage on their neighbors during this event. and i m looking directly into the camera because i want the people ahead of these storms to be aware that they are very dangerous, and they are marching eastward. so, just because now it s nighttime, the danger hasn t been minimized. it actually increases because tornados now are going to be shrouded in darkness. wolf, this area, the gulf coast in particular, is so vulnerable to tornados. it all has to do with population
or below freezing this week. there are winter storm advisories in the great lakes region, east texas and neighboring states and along the east coast and washington, d.c. and philadelphia metro areas. let s get more details on the forecast from meteorologist derek van dam. i was in shorts today, but i m getting whiplash from this weather because it is time to put the coats on. you summed it up perfectly. what a difference a day makes. and the people in the south really are feeling it now along the east coast, you re about to feel it because the cold front is moving through. these are the millions of americans that are impacted by the hard freeze that will occur this morning. this is actually a freeze warning anywhere from dallas to shreveport, jackson, birmingham. this is newly issued hard freeze warning for the atlanta metropolitan region. so in essence, the growing season is coming to an end across this area. we now have an upgraded freeze warning for some of the nation s largest po
earthquake, which means there s just not a lot of ground to absorb the shaking. so the likelihood of the potential of damage on the surface is high. in fact, some of the pager data we look at from usgs shows yellow, which means there was significant to severe shaking being felt. in fact, we ve tallied some of the numbers here. there was strong to very strong shaking felt in some of the population centers. you can see that moderate shaking was felt by over 7.8 million people. that s likely because there have been reports in taipei of some of the shaking as well. some of the larger population densities, even though they re well away from the epicenter in the southeastern portions of taiwan, feeling the impacts of this particular earthquake. as promised, i want to switch gears, talk quickly about the tropical storm that is impacting puerto rico right now. 65-mile-per-hour sustained winds with fiona not quite a hurricane yet, but getting closer.
that s important because a more shallow earthquake doesn t have the ground to really absorb the shaking that takes place during earthquakes so you tend to get more damage at the surface whereas a deeper earthquake if that was, say, 300 kilometers deep you would have a lot of ground to absorb that shaking and the damage on top of the surface wouldn t be as severe. now, we ve seen some of the population densities that experienced moderate shaking and that was because taipei felt that moderate shaking and that is why they have over 7 million people feeling that particular magnitude shock. i want to talk about what usgs has an estimated economic losses. what they do is they compare this particular earthquake to previous earthquakes of similar magnitude in a similar location and they give this percentage and they do estimate the highest likelihood of between $10 million to $100 million u.s.