Buried: A TV news crew files a report behind damaged homes after a mudslide struck at least 18 homes during heavy rains in Camarillo Springs. Photo: Reuters

Los Angeles: A Pacific storm lashed southern California with heavy rains and wind on Friday, triggering flash floods and mudslides that prompted the evacuation of hundreds of homes, damaged more than a dozen dwellings and disrupted passenger rail service along the coast.

One person was found dead on Friday in a rain-swollen flood-control channel in the Orange County town of Garden Grove, which could mark the third storm-related fatality on the West Coast since Thursday.

Separately, rescue teams saved one person from the Los Angeles River near a homeless encampment and were searching for another who was believed to have been swept away, the Los Angeles Fire Department said in Twitter messages.

Roof-high: A worker stands atop a pile of rock and mud after a mudslide struck at least eight homes during heavy rains in Camarillo Springs, California. Photo: Reuters

The Ventura County Fire Department said its personnel responded to 37 calls for assistance due to flooding.

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High winds tore down power lines throughout the region, leaving 78,000 customers without electricity after the storm moved in before dawn, utility officials reported.

The National Weather Service warned that thunderstorms and even tornadoes were possible as the storm front advanced, and that a water spout was sighted over the ocean near Los Angeles International Airport on Friday morning.

Angry sea: High waves crash under the Ocean Beach Pier as a winter storm brings rain and high winds to San Diego, California. Photo: Reuters

The same storm system pummelled the Pacific Northwest and the northern half of California on Thursday with torrential downpours and gale-force gusts that caused widespread power outages and disrupted commercial flights in San Francisco.

One of the areas hardest hit on Friday was the Ventura County community of Camarillo Springs, north of Los Angeles, where boulder-strewn rivers of mud swept down hillsides that a wildfire had stripped of vegetation last year.

Eighteen houses were deemed uninhabitable, eight of them sustaining heavy structural damage, according to meteorologist Mark Jackson, who was monitoring the situation from the National Weather Service office in nearby Oxnard.

Wintry blast: A satellite image of the Pacific storm hitting drought-stricken California. Photo: AFP

He said a mound of rocks was piled up against one house to its roof, and that rain had been falling at a rate of nearly 50 millimetres an hour before the slide hit. Authorities ordered people evacuated people from 124 houses judged to be at risk.

About 1000 homes were placed under evacuation orders in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendora, where mudslides from a wildfire-burned area left several roads impassable overnight, police Lieutenant Matt Williams said.

He said emergency crews rescued one motorist whose truck became caught in the muck.

Covered up: Rocks reach the roof of a home after a mudslide struck at least eight homes during heavy rains in Camarillo Springs, California. Photo: Reuters

Severe weather prompted Amtrak to suspend service on its Pacific Surfliner and Coast Starlight routes between Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo, 241 kilometres to the north, the passenger rail line said. But service was restored to both lines hours later.

The highest rainfall measured on Friday was at San Marcos Pass, just north of Santa Barbara, where more than 12.7 centimetres fell, Weather Service meteorologist Ryan Kattell said.

Harsh weather also hit Washington state and Oregon, where more than 200,000 customers were without power as of early Friday, according to local utility companies.

Recovery begins: Crews work near a fallen tree after a Pacific winter storm hit near Redmond, Washington. Photo: Reuters

In southern Oregon, a homeless man camping with his 18-year-old son was killed on Thursday morning when a tree toppled onto their tent. Portland police said a tree fell on a car that then swerved into another tree, killing the teenage passenger and seriously injuring the adult driver.

It was not known whether the body recovered in Garden Grove was a weather-related fatality or a victim who had died from some other cause and was washed into the flood channel, officials said.

The storm was expected to provide little relief from California's record, multi-year drought that has forced water managers to sharply reduce irrigation supplies to farmers and prompted drastic conservation measures statewide, weather officials said.

Reuters