Newsom Declared a Statewide Storm Emergency. He Also Closed 34 Old Emergencies.

The El Niño order tells Caltrans to stage snow and road-closure gear and readies the National Guard for flood rescue.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom proclaimed a statewide state of emergency for an El Niño winter that hasn't produced a storm yet, the governor's office announced. The proclamation is dated Monday, September 21, 2026, and it orders state agencies to pre-position equipment and supplies and loosens procurement rules ahead of the season.

For a household, that's a sandbag pile and a pump sitting somewhere near the street that floods. The order tells state agencies to stage flood-fighting gear. It also puts Caltrans to work parking traffic-control, road-closure and snow-removal equipment along the highways judged most at risk. Los Angeles County sits inside the statewide order like everywhere else.

Federal forecasters put the odds of a very strong El Niño this fall and winter above 90%, with a 75% chance the event reaches historic strength, according to the governor's office. California has already seen coastal flooding attributed to the pattern this year, as warm-water "Kelvin waves" push sea levels up and offshore Pacific hurricanes drive surf into the coast.

The proclamation also readies the California National Guard for flood response, search-and-rescue, engineering and logistics work. It directs environmental and natural resources agencies to fast-track permitting, so cities and counties can move flood, landslide and debris-flow projects before the rain.

"We're cutting red tape and fast‑tracking the flood‑protection and broader preparedness work communities need now," California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said in the announcement.

A separate directive tells the Governor's Office of Emergency Services to widen multilingual public messaging on flooding, evacuation readiness, alerts and power outages. "We are not waiting for this season's storms to be on our doorstep," Cal OES Director Caroline Thomas Jacobs said.

Then there's the housekeeping, which is the more revealing half of Monday. Newsom signed a separate proclamation ending 34 open states of emergency, declared for fires, storms and other events in 2023 and 2024, the governor's office said. The affected counties were consulted, and the finding is that those declarations are no longer needed for response or recovery.

Emergencies have a long tail of paperwork.

He opened new ones too: recovery proclamations covering three severe weather events that damaged Glenn, Humboldt, Kern, Mendocino and Santa Barbara counties, plus a major sewage spill in Lake County.

The climate argument sits underneath all of it. A study published last month in the journal Science found El Niño events are now more than 36% stronger than they were before the industrial era, the governor's office said. The trend has picked up over the past 40 years.

No dollar figure is attached to the mobilization. The full text of the order, including the provisions it suspends, is posted with Monday's announcement.

The state's own advice for the weeks before the first storm is plain enough:

• Find out whether your home is in a flood zone or downslope of a recent burn.
• Clear the drains and gutters.
• Sign up for city or county alerts.
• Keep an evacuation plan and a kit ready.
• Don't drive through standing water.

Source: gov.ca.gov, retrieved September 21, 2026.