As sunshine returned to Southern California on Monday, residents and officers mentioned the area had prevented catastrophic injury from Tropical Storm Hilary, which broke information for August rainfall because it handed into California on Sunday however was a lot diminished from the fearsome Category 4 hurricane that had alarmed meteorologists days earlier when it was over the Pacific Ocean.

Under sheets of rain, some neighborhoods within the desert cities east of Los Angeles grew to become a soupy mess and at one level on Monday the mayor of Palm Springs mentioned the town was lower off by highway closures. In San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, movies confirmed creek beds stuffed with sludge-colored torrents that ominously carried boulders and tree trunks.

Yet in one of the vital closely populated elements of the nation — Los Angeles and San Diego Counties alone have a mixed inhabitants of greater than 13 million — there have been no studies of deaths associated to the storm as of Monday afternoon.

“I can’t remember a major storm in which we had no fatalities,” Zev Yaroslavsky, a former Los Angeles county supervisor and metropolis councilman, mentioned Monday. “We were prepared and, as a result, we made our own luck.”

Hilary was certainly one of only a few tropical storms to hit California over the previous century. In anticipation of widespread challenges, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, had canceled lessons and after-school packages on Monday. Classes had been to renew Tuesday, the district mentioned.

Crews in Los Angeles, as in different cities in Southern California and Nevada, had been responding on Monday to studies of fallen timber, potholes and downed energy strains, together with some highway flooding. But officers usually expressed aid that issues weren’t a lot worse.

“By and large, we’re feeling pretty good about it because we’re not seeing a lot of impacts to homes and residents,” mentioned Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “We’re not seeing a single fatality or injury as of yet.”

Officials cautioned that some elements of the state had not but been dug out of the mud generated by the storm. The City of Palm Desert within the Coachella Valley urged residents to make use of “common sense and caution” as work crews continued to answer studies of injury. City officers mentioned that many timber had been downed and boughs damaged. They suggested residents to keep away from parks and flooded areas.

Nearby, Michael Contreras, the chief of the Cathedral City Fire Department, mentioned his employees rescued 46 individuals in 18 hours. That included 14 older residents at a board and care dwelling who had been ferried to security with bulldozers.

In the San Bernardino Mountains, the place some areas recorded greater than 10 inches of rain, the storm turned roads into raging rivers stuffed with particles and dust. It occurred so shortly on Sunday that the authorities advised residents within the Forest Falls neighborhood to remain of their properties, the place they had been nonetheless ready for the streets to be cleared on Monday.

State and native officers had been monitoring fragile hillsides, which may nonetheless soften right into a torrent of mud as much as 72 hours after the clouds have cleared. “We’re not out of the woods,” Mr. Ferguson mentioned.

In San Diego, emergency staff reported an in depth name: 13 homeless individuals had been rescued from the rain-swollen San Diego River on Sunday evening.

And within the mountainous Mt. Charleston space of Nevada, west of Las Vegas, residents had been being suggested to boil faucet water earlier than ingesting it after flooding brought on a extreme leak within the water system.

Before reaching California, the storm dumped monumental quantities of rain on Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. Some areas recorded almost 13 inches of rain in 24 hours, in accordance with the nation’s nationwide coordinator of civil safety, Laura Velázquez Alzúa. The earlier report was seven inches, from 1997.

Nearly 3,000 Mexican Marines had been mobilized to supply help and one individual was killed by speeding floodwaters. Another was lacking. But Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, posted in Spanish that “fortunately, there was not much damage.”

At a time of yr when Southern California is generally dangerously desiccated and really weak to wildfires, some meteorologists and engineers pointed to the optimistic results of the drenching rains.

Officials in Los Angeles County touted the success of initiatives that had sought to divert and retailer rainwater. As of Monday morning, Los Angeles County had captured sufficient storm water to provide not less than 33,600 residents for a yr, mentioned Steve Frasher, a public works spokesman.

And the storm was serving to to dampen fireplace dangers in Southern California, mentioned Daniel Swain, a wildfire knowledgeable on the University of California, Los Angeles. “There’s likely to be a prolonged reprieve in Southern California,” he mentioned in an internet briefing. “Enjoy it while you can.”

For householders who suffered flood injury, cleanup will likely be sophisticated by an additional problem: In part of the nation not accustomed to tropical downpours, lower than 1 % of households have federal flood insurance coverage. Home insurance coverage insurance policies sometimes don’t cowl flooding.

In Palm Springs, not more than 167, or 0.7 %, of the town’s roughly 24,000 households have flood insurance coverage insurance policies, in accordance with information from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which runs the federal program.

But in elements of California nearer to the coast, some had been puzzled at why the storm had acquired a lot consideration.

As the air cleared on Tuesday, Vazken Kouftaian, 40, a resident of Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles, took his 2-year-old son for a stroll. This storm, he mentioned, felt extra like a traditional rain bathe. “They were expecting something very bad,” he mentioned. “But it was nothing like that.”

Reporting was contributed by Corina Knoll from Los Angeles; Vik Jolly from San Diego; Rick Rojas from Las Vegas; Maggie Miles from Palm Springs, Calif.; Emiliano Rodríguez Mega from Mexico City; Sergio Olmos from Cathedral City, Calif.; Soumya Karlamangla from San Francisco; Shawn Hubler from Sacramento; Christopher Flavelle from Washington; and Anna Betts from New York.