By Rich McKay
Dec 26 (Reuters) - Storm-hit Southern California was at risk on Friday of more floods hampering millions of motorists traveling after Christmas, but the National Weather Service predicts a drier weekend.
The holiday deluge that started in earnest on Christmas Eve was spawned by the region's latest atmospheric storm, a vast airborne current of dense moisture siphoned from the Pacific, that swept inland over the greater Los Angeles area.
It dumped 6 inches of rain in the Los Angeles area with up to 18 inches of rain in the mountains, washing out some roads, and spurred evacuations and some shelter-in-place orders.
An additional 1-to-3 inches of rain is expected on Friday, said Tom Kines, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather, a commercial forecasting company.
"Our overall picture is that there's just one more day of this mess, mostly across Southern California, specifically in the LA area," Kines said on Friday. "We still have some issues today with bouts of heavy rain, but this weekend is mainly dry, thankfully."
More than 14.5 million Californians were expected to travel by car over the Christmas holiday, according to AAA. The coming drier weather should make traveling easier, after days of slick or flooded roads, forecasters said.
The atmospheric river that brought the trouble will wind down through Friday across California with lingering heavy rainfall, heavy mountain snow, and gusty winds.
Many of the evacuation warnings issued in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties were lifted on Christmas Day. But the orders remain on Friday in the hard-hit town of Wrightwood, a rural community with a population of about 5,000 in the San Gabriel Mountains on the border between Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties.
Aerial video footage posted online on Christmas Eve by the fire department showed rivers of mud coursing through inundated cabin neighborhoods, and mud-covered cars and homes.
Videos posted online on Thursday showed some residents scrambling over washed-out roads, picking through rubble on Christmas Day as streams of water still flowed over mounds of mud and into gullies that were once streets.
A 74-year-old motorist died on Sunday in Redding, California, when he drove around police barricades blocking a flooded road into deep floodwater where his pick up truck became submerged, Redding police said in a statement.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Donna Bryson, Alistair Bell and Nick Zieminski)
