CAPITOLA — More rain is expected to fall over the Bay Area and Northern California later this week — potentially exacerbating the effects of a two-week siege of atmospheric river storms that have caused major landslides, flooded roadways and has prompted evacuations across the state.
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.
Three days later, the newly reunited family had to flee as the New Year’s Eve storm flooded the bottom level of the two-story home nearly three feet deep with muddy water and debris. The home flooded again Monday, leaving it surrounded with several inches of thick mud.
“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.
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