Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday activated the state operations center of the California Office of Emergency Services, or Cal OES, triggering the coordination of federal, state and local agencies in response to the effects of a string of atmospheric rivers expected to move across the state over the next two to three weeks.

“The main impacts with this first storm system are going to be a lot of runoff from heavy rain,” said meteorologist Robert Hart of the National Weather Service. “Damaging winds across the northern and central part of California may bring some pockets of tree damage and power outages.”

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.