Multiple sources told the Bay Area News Group that Price and her new leadership team in their first full week in office moved to place at least three deputy district attorneys, including senior prosecutors, on leave.

Deputy District Attorneys John Brouhard, Butch Ford and Colleen McMahon are among the attorneys Price placed on paid administrative leave — a status that opens the door for their termination.

Additionally, Chief of Inspectors Craig Chew and Assistant Chief of Inspectors Andrea Moreland were fired, according to multiple sources. Unlike prosecutors, inspectors are considered at-will employees and can be terminated without arbitration. The attorneys placed on leave could not be fired until after a two-pronged process, which ends with a ruling by either an administrative law judge or an arbitrator.

On Friday, the mood inside the DA’s office ranged from demoralization to panic. Multiple employees were asked to inform their colleagues, and in some cases their friends, that they were to be placed on administrative leave and other attorneys sat in their offices wondering if they would be next, according to the sources.

Matt Finnegan, an attorney with the local union representing Alameda County prosecutors, said his office is representing the attorneys and will continue to do so “as more slips come in.”

“The biggest downside is that they aren’t going to be able to handle any cases while they’re on administrative leave,” Finnegan said.

It is unclear exactly why the prosecutors were shown the door. A spokeswoman for the DA’s office declined to comment.

However, Price had criticized some of the prosecutors, including Ford, during her 2022 campaign.

Ford, a longtime prosecutor with more than 30 murder trials under his belt, prosecuted an Oakland man, Shawn Martin, who won an appeal of his murder conviction over Ford giving jurors a misleading instruction. Martin was found not guilty on retrial, and later became a volunteer for Price’s campaign.

Martin’s case became a sticking point because just before his second trial, his attorney filed a failed motion to recuse the entire Alameda County DA’s office for alleged rampant misconduct. Just days before Price’s victory in the Nov. 8 election, Martin was identified as a suspect in a nonfatal shooting outside an Oakland bar and remains at large.

The shakeup also comes just days after Price reduced charges against suspected serial killer David Misch, who was being prosecuted by McMahon. Already incarcerated at a state prison hospital for stabbing a woman to death, Misch is facing a new trial in the slayings of two Fremont women and the abduction and killing of 9-year-old Michaela Garecht in Hayward, all cold cases from the 1980s.

Price dropped special circumstances charges against Misch, stirring controversy while making good on a campaign promise to review cases where individuals face life without the possibility of parole. It is the first of many such cases Price is expected to evaluate.

The official reason for sidelining Brouhard along with McMahon would be more of a mystery, if not for a common denominator among the two veteran prosecutors. While running for DA, Price held a press conference calling out McMahon, Brouhard and other prosecutors for using their government email accounts to campaign for Nancy O’Malley in 2018. O’Malley — who defeated Price and won re-election that year — announced her retirement in May 2021, opening up the seat for the first time in decades.

Price at the time said the prosecutors used county resources “to gain an unfair advantage” against her. Price and an attorney representing her campaign filed a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission alleging attorneys violated a state government code prohibiting an independent expenditure committee from coordinating with a candidate — in this case O’Malley.

The Fair Political Practices Commission investigation of the complaint filed by Price remains open, according to the FPPC. Like Ford, McMahon and Brouhard have handled numerous felony trials and are among the office’s most seasoned prosecutors.

Other high-ranking prosecutors who worked under O’Malley have left or are rumored to be eyeing the exit.

Veteran prosecutor Terry Wiley, the O’Malley-backed candidate who ran against Price in the November 2022 election, retired from the office after the election.

One early departure, according to sources, is Assistant District Attorney L.D. Louis, a 20-plus-year prosecutor. Louis is said to have joined the County Counsel’s Office, which oversees legal matters for the civilian side of the county. Louis was most recently the head of the DA’s mental health unit, specializing in policy as well as collaborative courts and alternatives to incarceration.

Top-floor prosecutors and inspectors, like Wiley and Chew, are at-will employees, meaning they could be dismissed without a reason. Virtually all prosecutors, except for assistant district attorneys, are represented by the Alameda County Prosecutors Association and cannot be terminated without cause. Prosecutors began organizing in 2018 and were formalized as a union two years later.

Any prosecutor placed on leave is entitled to a so-called Skelly hearing, which provides employees an opportunity to hear and defend themselves against the employer’s allegations.

In announcing her new leadership team last Friday, Price appointed retired Oakland police Capt. Eric Lewis as chief of inspectors and former Marin County Assistant District Attorney Otis Bruce Jr. and Royl L. Roberts, a Peralta Community College administrator who recently became the district’s general counsel after passing the state bar in July, as her two chief assistant district attorneys.

State must stopwasting rainwater

Professor Andrew Fisher’s article on increasing groundwater storage (“How California can save water from the atmospheric river,” Page A9, Jan. 8) may be feasible in the Pajaro Valley but not in the Central Valley due to the hardpan and salt buildup in the soils there.

It would be far better to build the Sites Reservoir south of Sacramento to store winter rains from the Sacramento River. But despite voters approving Proposition 1 in 2014 to build more water storage, Sacramento politicians seem to prefer sending years of excess rainwater down the Sacramento River to the ocean.

Ed KahlWoodside

Don’t reward migrantsfor breaking the law

If you don’t own a car and steal one, the law will not let you keep the car. If you embezzle, even if you are needy, you must repay the money. Similarly, if you break immigration laws, you should not be provided with food, housing, medical care or travel. Our justice system is based on the idea that you cannot benefit from breaking the law.

When people know that by crossing a border they can immediately improve their lives because of the foolish generosity of Americans, they will come in droves, as they have been. We need to stop giving away our wealth to lawbreakers; there is enough need here. Work on changing immigration laws, but don’t open the border and welcome lawbreakers with our taxes.

Denise KalmWalnut Creek

Letter ignorescritical COVID stats

Bob Wheeler would have us believe blue states with sustained lockdowns saved lives compared to red states that minimized lockdowns (“Plenty of reasons to vote for Democrats,” Page A6 Jan. 3). As evidence, he correctly states COVID deaths were higher in Florida (3,919 per million) than in California, (2,504 per million).

He conveniently ignores COVID deaths in New York, the poster child of lockdowns, which were almost the same as Florida — 3,897 per million according to the website Worldometer.

He also needs to take into consideration that about 75% of COVID deaths occur in people 65 and older, and Florida has a much higher percentage of seniors than either California or New York.

He also believes school closure learning loss is no big deal. In an affluent city like Walnut Creek with an abundance of resources, the learning gap in math and science can be closed. In Hayward, not so much.

Martin WilmingtonHayward

Paper should updatethe comics page

I am really tired of seeing political commentary on the comic pages: “Doonesbury,” which is outdated; “Mallard Fillmore,” which is out of touch; and “Dilbert,” which is just bad.

If you quit publishing dead white guys (Charles Schulz — and I love “Peanuts,” don’t get me wrong), please make room for new voices, especially women and people of color. The comics pages are still largely white, heterosexual, male, patriarchal standard fare.

Please update your comics pages. (And I’m sorry, “Cathy” doesn’t count.)

Karinne GordonPacific Grove

]]> https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2023/01/13/letters-1117/feed/ 0 8716205 2023-01-13T16:30:22+00:00 2023-01-15T10:11:34+00:00 https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2023/01/11/dark-dreary-bay-area-weather-is-expected-to-last-into-next-week/ https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2023/01/11/dark-dreary-bay-area-weather-is-expected-to-last-into-next-week/#respond Wed, 11 Jan 2023 19:24:41 +0000 https://www.eastbaytimes.com/?p=8712538&preview=true&preview_id=8712538 Don’t be fooled by Thursday’s lull.

The eighth and ninth storms to target California since Christmas are on the way this holiday weekend, making for volatile and treacherous conditions from the Bay Area to the Sierra.

The storms themselves won’t be as intense as those that devastated communities in the Santa Cruz mountains and along the beaches over the past week, but with rivers running high and soils already saturated, more flooding and mudslides are predicted across California. The Salinas River in southern Monterey County in particular is expected to flood Friday.

“We definitely appreciate the bounty, but we wish it was spread out over a longer period,” Jeff Lorber, meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said Wednesday.

So much snow has fallen already this season that sensors are registering what is considered the “full seasonal snowpack” normally expected by April 1, state climatologist Michael Anderson told reporters during a news briefing Wednesday. It’s still too soon to say whether the snowpack levels will hold until then, but if they do, they could provide ample snowmelt to continue to fill the reservoirs this spring and summer.

Kevin “Coop” Cooper, a longtime Tahoe area ski condition reporter and resort marketing consultant, said the abundant snow is a welcome change after several lean snow years during the state’s drought.

“Right now, I’m looking out of my house and it’s snowing lightly. We’re seeing a nice new amount of snow, temperatures are dropping,” he said Wednesday. “After my 30 years up here, this is one of the best MLK weekends we’ve seen in a long time.”

But that comes with a catch.

Video: California storms drop hail in the Bay Area, cause rockslides, sinkholes and more

With heavy snow and high winds predicted in the Sierra through the weekend, getting to the mountains could be dangerous. Travel in vulnerable areas, especially the Sierra, is not advised from Friday afternoon through Saturday, Lorber said, “when the winds and the rainfall will be at their peak.” The ninth storm is expected to roar in late Sunday through Tuesday.

It’s the kind of warning that weekend warriors amped to hit the Sierra slopes don’t like to heed.

“Fresh snow is like going through butter,” said Andrew Pham, 22, who stopped at Helm of Sun Valley ski shop in San Jose to attach bindings to his new snowboard and is planning to drive up Friday. “When you’re the first one on it, ooh.”

By Wednesday, snowpack levels reached 226% of average for this time of year, beating out 2005 which was 206% of average. All that fresh snow is giving experts reason to feel optimistic that drought conditions that have gripped the Golden State for three years could meaningfully ease by the end of the snowy season.

“The fact that we’re continuing to get this precipitation is just absolutely fantastic,” said Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist at the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Laboratory near Donner Summit. “It’s still unlikely that we’re going to get completely out of this drought in a single year. But if the storm door stays open… we can put a serious dent in it.”

As of Wednesday, major Northern California reservoirs have registered “impressive gains,” Anderson, the state climatologist, said. But there’s still plenty of catching up to do. Lake Don Pedro east of Modesto is at 69% capacity, for instance, and San Luis Reservoir southeast of the Bay Area, which has risen 35 feet since Dec. 1, is 40% full. The Shasta and Oroville reservoirs, the behemoths of California’s water system, are at 42% and 47% respectively. Lake Oroville has risen more than 90 feet since Dec. 1, surpassing its 2021 and 2022 levels.

“We’ve had quite a deficit because of the drought,” said Molly White, principal engineer with the state water board. “So we’re seeing steep inclines right now in storage, and hope that continues.”

In the Bay Area, Mount Umunhum in Santa Cruz County registered the highest rainfall total in the 24 hours leading to 10 a.m. Wednesday — 1.03 inches. Concord recorded 0.97 inches of rain. About six-tenths of an inch fell in Los Gatos; a quarter-inch fell at Ben Lomond, and two-tenths of an inch fell in San Jose and at the San Francisco International Airport.

In Tahoe, business is booming at ski resorts, despite struggles to keep lifts operational as a series of snow storms continues to plow through the Sierras. So much snow has accumulated in the Sierras already that ski resorts are having to keep track of avalanche risk hour-by-hour.

Mark McLaughlin, the so-called “storm king” who keeps track of Sierra conditions, said he listened to the concussive pounding Wednesday morning of cannons pelting the mountain sides of the Palisades Tahoe resort to trigger avalanches to improve safety before skiers arrive.

“I bet you I heard 20 of them this morning, 20 blasts,” McLaughlin said Wednesday.

John O’Connell, spokesman for Caltrans in the Lake Tahoe area, recommended that skiers from the Bay Area hit the road Thursday if they can, as the storm may arrive earlier Friday than initially expected. They should be prepared to put chains on their car tires unless they have four-wheel or all-wheel drive vehicles with tires designed for rain and snow. Either way, if there are chain controls due to ice and snow, vehicles should drive no faster than 30 mph, he said. And temporary road closures are possible during the snowstorms.

“We recommend people bring blankets, bottled water and snacks, have their phone charged up and a full tank of gas,” O’Connell said. “If we do have to hold traffic, you might be stuck up there in traffic that’s not moving for a little bit. We just want people to be prepared.”

Pham, who was tuning up his snowboard in San Jose on Wednesday, is still hoping to hit that fresh snow.

“But Dad called and said the storm is coming and I shouldn’t go,” he said. “So I guess I’m 50/50. But it would probably be worth it.”

Staff writer Scooty Nickerson contributed to this story.

The attack resulted in the disclosure of over 120,000 files related to BART’s police force operations. Among the documents, which were posted on a dark web site, were at least six unredacted reports detailing suspected child abuse, driver’s license numbers, and mental health evaluations, according to a review from NBC News. The files include personal information of the children and alleged abusers in some cases.

The hackers made “multiple sophisticated attempts” on BART’s network, the memo from BART Chief of Police Ed Alvarez said.

“Most of these attempts were unsuccessful,” Alvarez said. “Unfortunately, the attackers were able to exfiltrate less than 1% of the District’s internal business records.”

This hack did not include rider databases or financial records, according to a separate email sent to BART’s board of directors.

The hack was perpetrated by Vice Society, a notorious Russian criminal group that has targeted schools, hospitals, and public agencies around the world with ransomware attacks, according to Alvarez’s memo. Last week Brett Callow, a cybersecurity analyst at Emsisoft, said the group listed BART as the target of an attack.

“It’s often the case that other people scrape the data,” said Callow, in an interview. “Once the data is posted on these sites there is no way of knowing where it will end up or what other people may do with it.”

In an initial statement on Tuesday, BART spokesperson Alicia Trost said the agency is “investigating the data that has been posted.”

“To be clear, no BART services or internal business systems have been impacted,” she said. “As with other government agencies, we are taking all necessary precautions to respond.”

A summary of the incident provided to BART board members and the media, said the agency worked in consultation with state and federal law enforcement and outside cybersecurity experts after detecting the attack. A BART spokesperson declined to provide further details of the attack or if there was any attempt to negotiate a ransom with the hackers.

BART said it contracted with a data forensics firm to identify personal information disclosed in the hack and notify impacted individuals.

State and local officials on Tuesday began cleaning up from the half-dozen atmospheric rivers that have pummeled California since late December, killing at least 17 people and leaving 96,000 people under evacuation warnings or orders amid the risk of flooding and mudslides. Their work came amid a brief respite from the rain and the wind but with more strong storms expected to arrive later in the week.

Although none of the coming storms are forecast to be as big as the “bomb cyclone” that hit last week, residents have been warned to stay vigilant. While touring the storm and tide-ravaged community of Capitola on Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom cautioned that even a little rain could cause outsized effects due to heavily-saturated soils.

“The magnitude of this is not isolated to smaller communities, it is scaled across the largest state in our union,” Newsom said. “We’re soaked. This place is soaked. And now just more modest amount of precipitation could have as equal or greater impact in terms of the conditions on the ground.”

On Tuesday, nearly every corner of the state had felt the impacts of the recent atmospheric onslaught that caused flooding and myriad downed trees in Northern California, mudslides and a major evacuation in the Southern California community of Montecito and heavy snow across the length of the Sierra Nevada.

California Storms video: Hail in the Bay Area, rockslides, sinkholes and more

On the Central Coast, where some of the storm’s worst effects were felt, a 5-year-old boy died Monday after being swept away in a San Luis Obispo County creek, authorities said. A woman also drowned the same day after driving onto a mile-long section of Central Coast roadway that had been closed due to flooding, according to the California Highway Patrol.

Visiting the Santa Cruz coast, Newsom vowed to provide assistance to Capitola, where huge waves stoked from a “bomb cyclone” last week tore out a section of the historic Capitola Wharf and smashed and flooded a half-dozen beachfront Capitola Village restaurants.

“We’re not walking away,” Newsom said, standing on the town’s waterfront where generations of Bay Area residents have gone to frolic on the sand, dine and drink on seaside patios. From Dec. 31 through Sunday, heavy rains and a devastating tidal event caused at least $28 million in damages to public property across unincorporated Santa Cruz County, said Jason Hoppin, spokesman for Santa Cruz County. In addition, five buildings were red-tagged, and another 131 were deemed significantly damaged but repairable.

That doesn’t include any damage sustained Monday when the San Lorenzo River flooded its banks and sent water rushing into numerous buildings. Nor does it include a line of gusty storms to tear through the county early Tuesday morning, which prompted dozens of 911 calls from people reporting trees falling onto their houses..

Newsom gave no specifics regarding state aid to businesses Wednesday, nor details about funding for rebuilding the wharf. He also did not reveal whether the Seacliff Wharf — a state facility just down the coast that once led to a now-damaged cement-filled ship — would be repaired after damage from the storm. “All that will be determined,” Newsom said.

Around the Bay Area, the true extent of the recent storms began coming into focus Tuesday, even as thunderstorms dropped pea-sized hail and yet more rain.

In Santa Clara County, at least $24 million in damages to public property had been tallied by city and county officials through midday Tuesday — a figure that was expected to evolve as more assessments were completed, a county official said. Much of that tally included damage to roadways — more than a dozen of which remained closed midday Tuesday.

The heavy rains also caused dozens of sewage spills around the Bay Area and other parts of the state as sewage systems became overwhelmed by huge amounts of water pouring into the ground and seeping into pipes. Since New Year’s Eve, for example, at least 22 million gallons of “unauthorized discharges” occurred in the Bay Area, said Eileen White, executive officer for the San Francisco Bay Water Quality Control Board.

About 150 calls a day have streamed into the dispatch center for Bay Area Tree Specialists of late, said Michelle Reulman, the business’ office manager.

“This is a state of emergency,” said John Gill, owner of Majestic Tree Service, just moments after helping to clear a tree that fell on three vehicles and a house Wednesday off Bascom Avenue in San Jose. “You drive every five minutes, and there’s a tree down on a house or the street or the road or it’s flooded.”

In the early morning hours of Tuesday, a falling eucalyptus tree topped a 137-foot tall transmission tower in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood. The weight of the tower brought down three distribution poles as well as power lines and some transformers, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. spokesperson Mayra Tostado said in an update posted to Twitter. As a result, about 2,100 customers lost power.

“We’ve brought in additional resources to be able to restore power as quickly as possible to our customers,” Tostado said. “We understand how disruptive it has been to be without power and we’re doing everything we can to turn the lights back on as quickly as possible.”

Tostado said the region saw winds up to 70 mph and 100 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes.

The South Bay took a big punch from Mother Nature today. @PGE4Me responded to an outage in San Jose’s Willow Glen due to a eucalyptus tree knocking down a 137-ft. tall transmission tower. With its weight, it pulled down power lines and poles connected to it. Here’s my report. pic.twitter.com/HJUJm9tqDA

— Mayra Tostado (@PGE_Mayra) January 11, 2023

Many of the trees were felled during an onslaught of thunderstorms Tuesday that knocked out power to tens of thousands of people across the Bay Area, while dropping between .25 and 1.25 inches of rain across most of the South Bay, the East Bay and the Peninsula. Much of the Santa Cruz mountains received between .66 and 1.4 inches of rain overnight, pushing three-day storm totals to between 6 and 8 inches of rain across much of the area.

As of 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, 24-hour precipitation totals around the Bay Area included 1.21 inches in San Francisco, 1.18 inches in Oakland, 1.11 inches in Concord,.41 inches in San Jose and .40 inches in Livermore, according to the weather service.

More than 40,000 PG&E customers were without power as of 5 p.m. Tuesday — the majority of them in the South Bay where more than 27,000 customers remained without electricity, according to the utility provider.

To the east across the Sierra Nevada, a remarkable run of snowfall continued to push the state’s snowpack higher — reaching 215% of its average for this date across the state, according to the California Department of Water Resources. The southern Sierra already has received more than it normally gets by April 1, while the northern Sierra is about 75% of the way to that mark.

Another .1 to .25 inches of rain is expected to fall over much of the Bay Area on Wednesday, with higher amounts forecasted to hit the North Bay and the Santa Cruz Mountains, according to the National Weather Service. Some brief showers may hit the region on Thursday or Friday, but the area should remain mostly dry under cloudy skies those days.

Many residents found themselves whiplashed from the see-sawing weather. In Soquel, near Santa Cruz, Roman Bodnarchuk wondered aloud at the next curveball from Mother Nature after a dramatic two weeks of joy and catastrophe.

Just after Christmas, he had finally succeeded in getting his war-refugee parents out of Ukraine — where they lived near a power station under frequent Russian bombardment — and to his rented house by Soquel Creek.

“It’s very stressful,” said Bodnarchuk, 30. “You can imagine how frustrating it was to leave the house when my mom is sick and having to deal with all these situations. Hopefully the house withstands all this damage.”

He couldn’t help but feel a sense of dread at viewing forecasts for additional rain in the coming week

“We’re very worried,” Bodnarchuk said. “It’s been difficult enough already.”

Rick Hurd, Julia Prodis Sulek, Jason Green and the Associated Press contributed to this report. 

Because of risk of flooding and mudslides, evacuation warnings have been issued for some residents in Alameda and Santa Clara counties.

The map above shows the approximate areas of the advisories. As of Monday afternoon, there were no mandatory evacuations in those counties.

Alameda County

Residents of Kilkare Road, Palomares Road and Niles Canyon Road are “strongly encouraged” to evacuate. Details and updates at the sheriff’s Facebook and Twitter pages.

Santa Clara County

Warnings issued for:

• The Highway 101/Bolsa Road area, south of Gilroy.

• Pacheco Pass River Basin residents on Lovers Lane between Highway 152 and Shore Road, and El Toro Road between Highway 152 and Bloomfield Avenue.

• Uvas Reservoir watershed areas including Thousand Trails RV Park, Uvas Pines RV Park and homes south of Lions Peak and in the area of Watsonville and Day roads.

Residents of those areas are advised to prepare for short-notice evacuation. Find details and updates at the sheriff’s Facebook page.

San Mateo County and Contra Costa County

No official warnings had been issued as of Monday morning, but the west side of the Peninsula and the Danville area were under advisory on the Zonehaven emergency map.

In San Pablo, residents of 11th Street between Palmer Avenue and Rivers Street have been urged to use sandbags to protect their homes and to be prepared to leave if the neighborhood canal floods.

South of the Bay Area

Warnings including mandatory evacuations have been issued in Santa Cruz County and Monterey County. Santa Cruz County’s evacuation zones can be found on the Zonehaven map. For Monterey County’s warnings and orders, see the sheriff’s Facebook or Twitter page.

• Storm tracking map

• How to sign up for flood alerts

• The best way to use sandbags

The latest atmospheric river-fed storm is expected to pack damaging winds and drop several more inches of rain over much of the Bay Area — a double-whammy that forecasters say should peak Monday morning and linger through Tuesday. Even more storms are forecast to make landfall beginning later this week — threatening to further saturate soils during one of the Bay Area’s most waterlogged stretches in recent years.

On Sunday afternoon, Gov. Gavin Newsom implored Californians to avoid driving through flooded roadways and to prepare for even more water in the near future — noting that 12 people had died over the last week and a half due to storms across the state.

“Use your common sense,” Newsom said at a press conference. “Don’t test fate… just a foot of water and your car’s floating. So it’s really important that people are mindful, and again, just use their common sense.”

The National Weather Service issued a flood warning for areas along the Guadalupe River above the Almaden Expressway in San Jose. The river is expected to reach its flood state of 9.5 feet by 9 a.m. Monday before cresting at 11.5 feet at about 4 p.m. that day.

A flood watch also exists through Tuesday for almost the entire Bay Area. Alameda Creek near Niles Canyon and Sunol could reach its flood stage of 9 feet on Monday morning before cresting that afternoon, just shy of its 14-foot, 9-inch record. Also at risk of topping their banks were Arroyo de la Laguna at Verona in Alameda County and the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz County.

On Sunday afternoon, Santa Clara County officials issued evacuation warnings — essentially, advisements to be prepared to leave a moment’s notice — to people living in the watershed areas of the Uvas Reservoir and Pacheco Pass River Basin, due to flooding concerns. The warnings are impacting roughly 1,600 people, according to the county.

“This is going to be dangerous,” said Brayden Murdock, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

Updated forecast rainfall totals for round 2, expected to begin tonight between 10 pm and midnight. The heaviest rain will occur between 4 am and 4 pm Monday. Slight lowering of totals from the Bay Area northward and southern valleys. More details in follow up tweet.#CAwx

1/x pic.twitter.com/zs2HzaehAH

— NWS Bay Area (@NWSBayArea) January 8, 2023

Standing under a break in the clouds on Sunday in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, Becky Luong expressed fatigue at the unrelenting pace of storms. Her home’s garage in the Portola neighborhood was flooded with about an inch of water during Wednesday’s storm — ruining several pairs of shoes stored down there and leaving damaged a few bags of concrete.

“I’ve never experienced such a big storm like this,” said Luong, who has lived in the city for close to three decades. “It is the wind that makes it worse. This is different. I got scared.”

“I’m tired,” she added, about the recent wet weather. “I’m so grateful to see the sun today.”

Nearby, Nick Bulley waited in line for workers to fill his car with sandbags to protect his house in the hilly Twin Peaks neighborhood. The backyard and first floor of his newly renovated home were flooded during the New Year’s Eve storm with an inch of water, likely causing thousands of dollars in damage. On Sunday, he ran a dehumidifier to suck up all the moisture and limit the cost of repairs.

“This was just an unusual event,” Bulley said. “We weren’t prepared. We didn’t have sandbags. Now we’re making sure we have something to at least toss in front of the doors.”

The heaviest downpours should begin to subside by midday Monday, Murdock said, though chances for additional precipitation should linger through Tuesday. Most of the Bay Area — including San Francisco and Oakland — could see 2 to 3 inches of rain by Tuesday, the weather service said. San Jose is expected to see a little more than 2 inches from this storm.

The heaviest rainfall should fall over the waterlogged Santa Cruz Mountains, where 5 to 7 inches of rain is expected, with a few places seeing as much as 8 inches. To the south, the Santa Lucia Mountains along the Big Sur coast could see 8 to 12 inches of rain in some spots.

Winds of 25 to 35 mph are expected across much of the Bay Area’s lower-lying regions, with gusts potentially hitting 60 mph, the National Weather Service said while issuing a high wind warning. Along the coast and the Bay Area’s peaks, forecasters are expecting winds of 35 to 50 mph and gusts of up to 80 mph.

“This is also going to be a wind event,” said Murdock, adding that “when you do have strong winds after seeing plenty of moisture in the soil, you can see trees fall.”

The storm marks the latest atmospheric river to drench Northern California over the last couple of weeks, whipsawing the region from one of its driest three-year runs in recorded history to a state of perpetual flood risk. Oakland, for example, has received 15.84 inches of rain since Dec. 1 — almost all of it in the last two weeks. That’s more than two-thirds of the 22.89 inches of rain it normally gets in a calendar year.

Still, even though the recent wet weather has begun to alleviate drought conditions across Northern California, experts say even more moisture is needed to put an end the region’s historic drought. Water levels at some of the state’s largest reservoirs — including Lake Shasta, Lake Oroville and Trinity Lake — remain below historical averages for this time of year, even though some have started to tick upward in recent weeks.

He said that federal resources have been mobilized to help the National Weather Service’s forecasts. Five Air Force C-130s and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration aircraft are flying over the Pacific Ocean – reaching as far as Hawaii – to gather data on the coming storms.

“These next storms are really going to start seeing some flood stages be reached,” said Anderson, during a call with reporters Saturday. “There’s a lot to keep an eye on and a lot to track.”

For more on the latest emergency warnings, go to aware.zonehaven.com.

High Wind Warning has been issued for our region starting tonight at 8 PM into Monday 4 PM. Expect southerly winds near 20 to 35 mph with gust up to 60 mph in the valley locations and 35 to 50 mph with gust up 80 mph along the coast and highest peaks. #CAwx #highwind pic.twitter.com/VbzaXV22ez

— NWS Bay Area (@NWSBayArea) January 8, 2023

The worst of the fast-moving tempest was expected to pass late Wednesday night, leaving Northern California windswept and reeling from its third major storm in just over a week. Fueled by a meteorological phenomenon known as a “bomb cyclone” churning over the Pacific, the storm was expected to pummel a broad swath of California from Crescent City to Los Angeles, while raising the threat of mudslides and debris flows over inland burn scars and causing dangerous, near-impossible travel conditions over the Sierra.

“We anticipate that this may be one of the most challenging and impactful series of storms to touch down in California in the last five years,” said Nancy Ward, director of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.

Across the Bay Area, powerful winds left thousands of people without power Wednesday afternoon, while forcing one school district in South San Francisco to cancel classes Thursday. In San Jose, local authorities fanned out in a last-minute push to evacuate unhoused people living along creek beds — a warning that some people refused to heed, citing an unwillingness to leave their make-shift homes. Others thought the dangers were overblown.

Hours before the storm’s arrival, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency to hasten the state’s response. Authorities in Santa Cruz County issued mandatory evacuations for areas near Felton, Soquel and Watsonville, while Alameda County sheriff’s deputies went door-to-door urging people to leave their homes near Sunol, due to the risk of flood waters or felled trees.

A few hours before the storm began whipping the coast, Rio del Mar sisters-in-law Mary and Maureen Sztenderowicz fled their house just down the coast from Santa Cruz, where Aptos Creek meets the ocean. The two planned to stay for a night or two with a relative in Santa Cruz — but were uncertain of what they’d return to find at their home a few blocks from the ocean.

“We don’t want to be stuck and not able to get out,” said Mary Sztenderowicz, who is in her 70s.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office deputies posted red evacuation orders outside homes in the Rio del Mar flatlands Wednesday afternoon. “We’re not going to make people leave,” said Deputy Ryan York. Instead, he told people that if they don’t evacuate, they may not be able to get help in case of emergency.

Of primary concern was Aptos Creek, York said. Although the waterway was not raging Wednesday afternoon, ocean swells and tides — both forecasted to be very high Wednesday night and Thursday morning, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — are expected to surge in, and by blocking outflow of stream water, raise the creek’s level even higher, York said.

Wednesday’s storm did not appear potent as the New Year’s Eve deluge that dropped record amounts of rain in some parts of the Bay Area and caused mudslides that left some roadways, including Highway 9 near Felton, closed.

But soils in the area appear to be increasingly saturated, compounding the risk of flooding. Oakland, for example, received 13.16 inches of rain in December – the vast majority of it in the last week, when 8 to 11 inches of rain fell over the city. That’s two and a half times the amount received over the previous 11 months – an astonishing amount for a city that normally only gets about 22 inches of rain every calendar year.

And this time, meteorologists feared the storm’s potential for damaging winds more than rain.

One gust on Wednesday along Soda Springs Road above Los Gatos reached 78 mph, while another near Kahler Court in Milpitas hit 75 mph, according to the National Weather Service. Another gust hit 56 mph in Salinas, a town that sits less than 100 feet above sea level, where the winds from such storms are normally less severe.

“This is a wind event as much as it is a heavy rain event,” said Brayden Murdock, a National Weather Service meteorologist. “And some of these (winds) are filtering into lower elevations, which means they’re going into areas that are populated. That means trouble for power lines in particular.”

More than 11,000 Pacific Gas and Electric customers were without power early Wednesday afternoon — a number that forecasters feared would rise as the storm came ashore. That included 8,295 customers in the South Bay and 1,169 people in the East Bay.

PG&E dispatched 2,900 workers Wednesday to tackle downed power lines and other outages throughout the Bay Area. That included 800 people to monitor electric incidents, 360 four-person electrical crews and 397 so-called trouble-men, who are distribution line technicians, system inspectors and first responders from the utility.

Seventy-four flights — or about 8% of the day’s schedule — were cancelled at San Francisco International Airport due to wind and rain that reduced visibility and caused flight controllers to stagger airport landings and departures on some runways, said Doug Yakel, an airport spokesman. Another 174 flights were delayed an average of 35 minutes, impacting about 20% of the day’s flights, he said.

To the south, Caltrans closed a sprawling section of Highway 1 along the entire Big Sur coast amid concerns of debris falling onto the roadway. The closure extended from just south of Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn in Monterey County to Ragged Point in San Luis Obispo County. The agency gave no estimate for when the roadway would reopen.

Concerns about mudslides extended to several communities across the Bay Area.

Santa Clara County closed several roads due to mudslides, flooding and downed trees, including parts of Calaveras, Felter, Mines, and Sierra roads.

In Richmond, the residents of 15 homes along Seaview Dr. and Seacliff Way were urged by police to evacuate after the hillside behind the development started to slide along a walking trail on the slope. A local contractor immediately began mitigation measures on the hill, including spreading plastic tarps over the fissures to prevent additional hazards, according to an online post from Mayor Tom Butt.

The prospect of a waterlogged hillside growing unstable during the storm left other nearby residents on edge. It’s common to see soil carried down the hillsides of this Richmond neighborhood when it rains heavily, said Faith Miller, who lives on nearby Flagship Place.

“We have retaining walls, but that’s a lot of dirt up there,” Miller said as the brunt of the storm hit Wednesday afternoon. “We’ve been looking and keeping on eye on our backyard.”

Austin Turner and Harry Harris contributed to this report. 

Civil rights attorney Pamela Price took office Tuesday as the first Black woman to serve as Alameda County District Attorney, hours before longtime sheriff’s deputy Yesenia Sanchez was sworn in as the first Latina woman to head the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office.

In taking office, the women signaled a new era for law enforcement in this part of the Bay Area — vowing numerous changes after riding a wave of support from progressive-leaning voters in 2022.

Before a standing room-only crowd, Price stressed that voters gave her a mandate to “create and build and have a better criminal justice system.” She takes over for Nancy O’Malley, a three-term District Attorney who announced in May 2021 she would not seek re-election, ending a 37-year tenure as a county prosecutor.

“This moment is an exclamation point in history for Alameda County,” Price told a gallery of more than 125 people moments after being sworn in at Rene C. Davidson Courthouse. She added that “the system has not been working for the people of Alameda County, and that we can — and must — do better.”

“This is where the campaign ends and the work begins,” Price said. “We will have a District Attorney’s Office that is committed to transparency, equality and accountability to make this system work for all of our residents.”

Standing before hundreds of people inside the Oakland Scottish Rite Center, Yesenia Sanchez echoed that pledge — vowing to reform Santa Rita Jail while inviting greater community input as the county’s new sheriff. The moment capped a stunning upset in the June primary election that saw Sanchez defeat longtime Sheriff Gregory Ahern, who had never faced an election opponent since rising to office 16 years ago.

She was sworn in within a week of Christina Corpus, another reform-minded candidate across the bay in San Mateo County who also unseated an incumbent sheriff. Together, Sanchez and Corpus represent the first two Latina women elected to the position of sheriff in California.

“My focus is on the reforms needed to ensure the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office demonstrates fair and equitable practices in all that we do,” said Sanchez, in remarks given moments after being sworn in. “We’re going to be engaging our community members — you will have a voice in how we provide services.”

Their victories — Sanchez during the June primary, Price in the November election — came as public safety concerns have mounted in recent years amid a pandemic-era surge in homicides and gun violence. While rates of killings and shootings appeared to plateau across much of the East Bay in 2022, they remain far higher than just three years ago, before the coronavirus pandemic reordered society.

Each woman’s ascent signaled a continued appetite for criminal justice reforms among East Bay voters, even after San Francisco voters made national headlines for recalling their own progressive-minded district attorney, Chesa Boudin, last year, political observers have said.

Price drew sizeable support from Oakland, San Leandro and Berkeley in atoning for a loss to O’Malley in the 2018 primary election. Along with Oakland, Sanchez relied on voters from Union City, Newark and parts of Fremont — areas that have traditionally leaned more conservative and had been expected to go in Ahern’s favor.

Exactly what could change in Alameda County over the next several months and years remains unclear.

Sanchez vowed myriad changes, including vast reforms at the troubled Santa Rita Jail — a facility that has routinely been scrutinized for scores of inmate deaths over the last decade and abysmally-poor mental health care. Her transition team is developing a report that will outline the framework for her agency and the changes that she intends to make, Sanchez said Tuesday.

Price’s 26-person transition team includes only one current Alameda County prosecutor, Jimmie Wilson, and a raft of outsiders. Among them are Barbara Becnel, a death penalty reform advocate; Rashidah Grinage, of the Oakland-based Coalition for Police Accountability; several civil rights attorneys and multiple local nonprofit leaders.

On Tuesday, Price asked for patience from Alameda County residents while she hired new prosecutors and implemented her reforms.

“We have assembled a great team to help fix and repair our brokenness,” Price said. “And we’ll walk into the office today for the first time with pride and purpose.”

Measures expanding family leave, providing for bereavement leave and mandating pay transparency are among lawmakers’ “incredibly productive” record of accomplishment, said Mariko Yoshihara, legislative counsel and policy director for the California Employment Lawyers Assn. “But there’s still a lot more work to do.”

Legislative wrestling between worker advocates and the state’s powerful industries meant several ambitious efforts failed to gain traction last year. They are likely to surface again this year, including bills to expand overtime, protect employees from artificial intelligence surveillance and stop businesses from moving call centers out of state.

The California Chamber of Commerce celebrated the demise of 17 out of 19 bills it had dubbed “job killers” reflecting “a lack of appreciation of the economic realities and regulatory challenges employers — and especially small business employers — face as they continue to emerge from the impacts of the pandemic.”

One of the most controversial new laws, aiming to set industrywide wage and workplace conditions for fast-food restaurants, is on hold as opponents seek to overturn it with a proposed 2024 ballot measure.

Nonetheless, in a big win for low-wage workers most affected by the state’s high cost of living, California raised its minimum wage to $15.50 on Jan. 1, applying it to all employers, regardless of size. The half-dollar boost resulted from a 2016 law that mandated inflation-related adjustments.

An estimated 3.2 million Californians — 18.9% of the workforce — are getting raises, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

The Golden State’s 2023 pay floor is the highest after Washington state ($15.74) and Washington, D.C. ($16.10). But more than 30 California cities and counties have enacted minimums above the state’s, including the city of Los Angeles, which raised its floor to $16.04 in July.

Among the most significant new labor laws:

PAY EQUITY

Can employers get away with paying women less than men? With paying Latino, Black and Asian workers less than white counterparts?

Senate Bill 1162, written by Sen. Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara) makes that harder by requiring employers with 15 or more workers to reveal salary ranges to workers and list them on job postings. The California Labor Commissioner can issue fines of as much as $10,000 for failure to comply.

The law was championed by first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a leader of a campaign to close the gender pay gap. It was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, surrounded by members of the Legislative Women’s Caucus.

Limón called it “a big moment for California workers, especially women and people of color who have long been impacted by systemic inequities that have left them earning far less than their colleagues.”

In December, just 44% of California employers included pay data in their job postings, according to an analysis by the job site Indeed.

Washington, Colorado, Connecticut and New York City have enacted similar transparency laws. California’s new measure builds on a 2020 law requiring companies with more than 100 employees to confidentially submit wage data by sex, race, ethnicity and job category to the state’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing.

That reporting will now also be required for workers hired through third-party staffing agencies or labor contractors.

Limon’s original bill would have required the state to publicly disclose the pay data it collects from individual companies with 250 employees or more — not just issue general reports. The provision was removed after furious pushback by business groups. The California Chamber of Commerce called it a “cynical and disingenuous” measure that would invite lawsuits.

Limón plans to continue the push for more disclosure, saying, “This fight is far from over.”

FAMILY LEAVE

What if you and other Californians funded the state’s family leave program through your paycheck deductions, but then, after you gave birth or had to care for a sick relative, you couldn’t afford to miss work?

For two decades, that’s been the case for millions of workers because the program offered just 55% wage replacement for as long as six weeks — a hardship for people barely making ends meet in a state with a high cost of living.

Many low-wage Californians, disproportionately Latino, Black and female, have had “to keep working against their doctor’s orders, to work up until the day they go into labor, to leave ill family members without adequate care, and to return to work right after having a child,” said Katherine Wutchiett, an attorney at Legal Aid at Work, a San Francisco nonprofit.

High- and middle-wage earners, who could afford a pay cut, have tapped into the program at four times the rate of the lowest-paid workers, according to the California Budget and Policy Center.

As COVID-19 took hold in 2020, the Legislature raised payouts to between 60% and 70% of a worker’s salary for eight weeks. But that boost — still insufficient for many who live paycheck to paycheck — was set to expire this month.

Now Senate Bill 951, written by Sen. María Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles), extends the COVID-prompted increase for two years. And in 2025, it will remain at that level for workers earning more than $57,000 a year. But wages for employees making less will be replaced at 70% to 90%.

The U.S. is one of only two nations in the world with no national paid family leave program. But California “can now be proud that our state leads when it comes to equity for low-paid workers and families of color,” Durazo said.

The new law deletes a current provision allowing workers who earn more than $145,000 a year to contribute less into the fund. Nonetheless, a legislative analysis calculates that the new funding will not fully offset the roughly $3 billion to $4 billion in expanded benefits.

BEREAVEMENT LEAVE

“No person should fear losing their job by taking time to grieve the death of their loved one,” said Evan Low (D-Campbell), author of a new law giving Californians the right to bereavement leave.

Under Assembly Bill 1949, California employers with five or more workers must allow them up to five days of unpaid, job-protected leave upon the death of a close family member, including a spouse, child, parent, sibling, grandparent, grandchild, domestic partner or parent-in-law.

No federal law requires bereavement leave, thus leaving it up to employers to make informal arrangements that may not adequately address workers’ need to grieve. Employees can be fired for missing work to attend a funeral.

Opposed by businesses in recent years, a bereavement law became more urgent with more than 97,700 California deaths linked to the virus that causes COVID-19. But beyond the pandemic, Low said, the law will have “a long-lasting impact. We cannot expect people to work at full productivity while they are mourning the death of a loved one.”

The law allows employers to require documentation such as a death certificate, a published obituary or verification from a funeral home.

FARMWORKERS

More than 400,000 farmworkers harvest $51 billion in crops yearly in California fields. Less than 2% belong to a union, far below the 16% level of the state’s workforce.

A new law, Assembly Bill 2183, written by Assemblyman Mark Stone (D-Scotts Valley), makes it easier to unionize these low-wage workers. Many are undocumented immigrants who speak little English. And they often are unaware of their rights or fearful of retaliation, according to the United Farm Workers, which pushed for the measure.

Under current law, union elections, usually held on growers’ properties, are supervised by the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board. The new measure allows farmworkers to vote by mail or fill out a ballot card to be dropped off at the board.

Western Growers, an agribusiness association, said the law overturns “the right of farmworkers to a state-supervised secret ballot election.” A provision allowing union representatives to help fill out workers’ ballots will lead to “a relentless campaign of union pressure and harassment,” the group predicts.

The UFW argues that the measure levels the playing field between workers and employers, especially since the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2021 ruled that landowners have a right to keep union organizers off their property.

Similar “card check” bills were vetoed by Govs. Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year. Newsom also planned to veto AB 2183 for “lack(ing) critical provisions to protect the integrity of the election.”

But a stirring 24-day, 335-mile march by farmworkers in August from Delano to Sacramento, reprising Cesar Chavez’s historic 1966 march, ratcheted up pressure on the reluctant governor. And President Biden endorsed the bill, declaring, “Farmworkers worked tirelessly and at great personal risk to keep food on America’s tables during the pandemic. … The least we owe them is an easier path to make a free and fair choice to organize a union.”

Newsom signed the bill after legislators agreed to future amendments that nonetheless preserve the key card-check provision. The law expires in five years.

FAST FOOD

For more than a decade, the Service Employees International Union, one of the nation’s largest, has sought to organize low-wage workers at McDonald’s and other fast-food chains with its “Fight For $15 and a union ” campaign.

The effort helped boost California’s minimum wage, but except for a few Starbuckslocations in recent month s, the state’s quick-service eateries, with 550,000 employees, have fought off unionization.

A new law, Assembly Bill 257, sponsored by the SEIU, would set a bold precedent with a 10-member Fast Food Council to regulate wages, hours and working conditions across chains with at least 100 outlets nationwide. The first-of-its kind body would include worker delegates, industry representatives and state officials.

But corporate giants, including In-N-Out Burger, Chipotle Mexican Grill and Starbucks, backed by the California Chamber, have collected a million signature s for a 2024 referendum to overturn the measure and persuaded a judge to delay its implementation.

Should the Fast Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act — known as the Fast Recovery Act — survive, the council could raise wages as high as $22 an hour. It could enact health, safety and discrimination standards in an industry plagued with complaints over wage theft, sexual harassment and failure to protect workers from COVID-19.

The approach resembles European sectoral bargaining but marks a sharp departure from U.S. custom in which unions normally target just one business at a time.

Although labor unions argue that the law would give workers “a voice on the job” in the absence of collective bargaining, industry groups contend it would lead to higher menu prices and, for workers, reduced hours or layoffs.

Corporate lobbyists succeeded in killing early provisions that would have made corporate chains jointly responsible with franchisees for wage theft and other violations and allowed the council to regulate shift scheduling and sick leave.

CONSTRUCTION PAY

Residential construction workers traditionally earn less than workers on commercial projects with government funding, which must pay “prevailing” — usually union-scale — wages. Two new laws, Senate Bill 6 and Assembly Bill 2011, require those higher wages on affordable housing projects in corridors previously zoned for commercial use.

MARIJUANA USE

Beginning in 2024, employers can no longer penalize most employees for off-work use of marijuana thanks to Assembly Bill 2188, written by Assemblyman Bill Quirk (D-Union City).

ABORTION CARE

Senate Bill 1375, written by Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), allows experienced nurse practitioners to more easily qualify to perform abortions independent of a physician.