Tulare County residents prepare for more rain

The only way in and out of Crystal Yanez's Orosi home is through several inches of standing water. "We're okay right now. It hasn't gotten into the house."

Yanez and her family have been living like this for three days. They laid out dozens of sandbags to help dry out the area. But, those sandbags are now completely soaked from all the rain.

"If it does get any worse, we're hoping that at least it doesn't get up into the house."

With more rain expected this New Year's weekend, Jesus Mercado and his friends are planning ahead. Friday, they filled a truck load of sandbags at the Tulare County Fire Station in Orosi and delivered them to their nearby church.

Jesus Mercado says, "Well, we're expecting some rain tonight, and we want to be prepared."

Despite the break in rain, flooding is still an issue all over Tulare County. Avenue 360 at Road 100 remained closed Friday.

At the Tulare County Correctional Center, inmates pumped water back into a canal which flooded earlier in the week.

Tulare County Supervisor, Steve Worthley says road and cleanup crews are on call this weekend to deal with any additional problems. Worthley says, between roads, personal properties and farms-damages County wide will exceed tens of millions of dollars! "Before this last storm, we were saying about 60-million dollars of estimated damage, so it will probably go up from there, obviously this last storm did a lot more damage than the previous ones had done," said Worthley.

According to Worthley, because Tulare County is under a state of emergency, they will rely on the government to help with those costs. In fact, state and federal officials are expected to tour the storm damage in Tulare County on January 3rd.