Capitola has been a storm target since its early days as the privately owned “Camp Capitola” seaside resort, long before its incorporation as a city in 1949. And the wharf that lost a 40-foot section Jan. 5? It’s been there before. And not just once.

Capitola Village, long a beloved coastal getaway for Bay Area residents and a destination for visitors from all over the world, sits along a south-facing beach on a broad cove just down the coast from Santa Cruz on Monterey Bay. A 2017 City of Capitola report notes that “significant storms, with associated damage, strike the Monterey Bay communities with a frequency of one large storm every 3 to 4 years,” and that, “This equates to a 25% to 33% chance of a large storm occurring within Capitola in a given year.” Climate change effects on the Pacific Ocean, and on Soquel Creek that flows between Capitola Village’s colorful Venetian apartments and its beachfront restaurants as it meets the ocean, “could increase the probability and intensity of flooding in Capitola,” the report says.

Capitola Historical Museum curator Deborah Osterberg dug back into the past 100 years and compiled a litany of weather-wrought catastrophes befalling the Capitola village and wharf.

In 1913, a surging ocean full of debris swept across the beach, into the village and up Capitola Avenue. “Huge waves smashed against the wharf, taking out a 200-foot section,” Osterberg said. A fisherman named Alberto Gibelli, who had gone out to the end of the wharf to secure his boats and equipment, was left stranded until a rescue boat arrived and a rope and life preserver were tossed. Gibelli “tied the rope under his arms and leapt into the ocean and he was pulled to safety,” Osterberg said.

That storm destroyed a section of the wharf in the same area as the portion washed away lasts week. According to the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, during episodes of very high surf, a sandbar develops near the Capitola Wharf in roughly the same spot. “This influences where waves will crest and unleash their force,” the museum tweeted Saturday, with photos of the damage in 1913 and 2023. “Hence, history repeating itself.”

Thirteen years later, Mother Nature struck again, with the same kind of double-whammy delivered to Capitola last week: giant waves on top of a high tide. Again, the village was flooded as far as Capitola Avenue, a block from the ocean. And as occurred last week, the Venetian apartments — the picturesque row of habitations starring today in many a social media post — suffered damage. So high were the waves that they slammed into the Hotel Capitola’s second floor. A bathhouse and boathouse with distinctive arches in its beachfront facade made it through, but its wooden dressing rooms were splintered apart.

In 1931, another major tide-and-storm combo hit, trashing vacation cabins and wiping out a newly built miniature-golf course on the waterfront esplanade.

Four years later, during another cataclysm, the ocean washed a playground off the Capitola waterfront. A historical photo shows that beside the former playground site, a wooden platform held up several beachfront businesses. Osterberg believes that platform, built in the 1920s, is the same structure that currently supports the restaurants badly damaged in last week’s storm, including Zelda’s, The Sand Bar and Paradise Beach Grill. This week, Capitola city manager Jamie Goldstein said an engineering assessment determined that the wooden platform, which sits on pilings above the sand and water, was “structurally safe” for crews to start fixing the buildings, but would require expensive repairs. Also this week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom stood on an undamaged portion of the platform and told news media the state was not “walking away” from the damage to Capitola, but he declined to specify what assistance might be forthcoming.

The Venetian apartments got slammed again in 1937.

In 1958, storm-driven seawater hit the esplanade so forcefully that it knocked the horses off a merry-go-round.

Then 25 years later, the wharf took major blows from a series of storms that broke 35 feet off its end and destroyed a 30-foot section.

Newsom and Capitola officials said this week it was too early to tally the financial damage from last week’s storm. The city lifted no-entry orders for the three waterfront restaurants most severely damaged, and restaurant owners now have crews working to rebuild. Josh Whitby, co-owner of Zelda’s, has removed the seawater, kelp and broken trees that filled his dining room after waves pushed a large beam from the wharf through the waterfront windows and wall. The beam, however, remains. “It’s probably going to end up as part of our decor,” Whitby said.

Recycling business California Waste Solutions alleged in the lawsuit filed in Santa Clara Superior Court that the City of San Jose broke its contract with CWS to jointly develop a consumer-education campaign on proper recycling, leading to millions of dollars in costs shifted onto the company instead of the city.

“The City forced CWS to collect, process and dispose of massive amounts of garbage in the recycling containers,” the lawsuit said. “The City claimed CWS was exaggerating the problem until it conducted its own study confirming as much as 58% of the recycling containers were garbage and other non-recyclable material.”

San Jose city attorney Nora Frimann declined to comment on the company’s claims, saying her office typically doesn’t speak publicly about lawsuits. The city and the company have been in a long-running dispute. The firm in 2021 settled for $6 million a lawsuit by the City of Oakland over recycling fees charged to apartment-building owners.

According to the suit against San Jose filed by CWS on Jan. 6, the company provided recycling services to about a third of San Jose’s residents under a 2010 contract. A purported copy of the contract filed as a court exhibit says the recycling firm would “partner with” the city’s environmental services department to “develop education programs” to prevent residents from contaminating recyclables with trash. Programming was to potentially include tactics including providing recycling information in multiple languages, outreach to children on recycling practices, and setting up tables or kiosks at public events such as parades to spread recycling information, according to the document.

By allegedly reneging on the agreement, the city cost the company about $34 million, the company claimed. “The greater the amount of garbage improperly placed in the recycling containers, the greater the expense to CWS,” said a letter of claim from the company to the city that was also filed as an exhibit.

The firm had to pay more than $6 million in extra landfilling costs, and the “many tens of thousands of tons” of trash it had to pick up from recycling containers added another $14 million in expenses, the letter claimed. Increased processing costs for dealing with the contamination amounted to more than $10 million, the letter alleged. Also, the amount of recoverable recyclables was “substantially reduced because otherwise recyclable material was contaminated by food waste, used diapers and many other types of putrescible garbage,” leading the city to hit the company with more than $2.5 million in penalties for not meeting its contractual performance standards, the letter claimed.

San Jose reaped financial rewards “in multiple ways” by failing to uphold the contract, the suit alleged. “Under the City’s agreements with garbage collection companies, the City was required to pay disposal costs for garbage. But when that garbage was placed in a recycling container, the disposal cost was shifted from the City to CWS,” the suit claimed. “The landfill operator then paid payments to the City for each ton of garbage disposed of by CWS — creating a double benefit to the City from City residents putting garbage in their recycling containers.”

San Jose prohibited the company from declining to pick up contaminated recycling containers or educating residents on its own, the letter alleged.

The rocky relationship between CWS and the city goes back years. In 2016, a city consultant accused the company of underinvesting in a recycling plant and understaffing it, and city officials claimed that CWS was refusing to pick up recyclables at a much higher rate than another city-contracted recycler, leading to large numbers of complaints from residents. The company responded to those allegations by attributing problems to contamination of recyclables with trash, the core issue of the lawsuit.

In 2019, with city staff saying that CWS had issued an average of more than 4,000 “non-collection notices” to residents per month from January through September 2018, San Jose’s city council considered letting its contract with CWS expire and finding a replacement contractor, but ended up renewing the agreement.

In its lawsuit against San Jose, CWS is seeking $34 million in damages and $14.4 million in restitution.

As the state’s water supply shrinks from too much consumption and not enough replenishment amid climate change and long-term drought, and extreme weather brings floods, companies are paying increased attention to water, and the risks to commerce — including regulation — that arise when supply can’t meet demand.

“Water is the new carbon,” says water-resources engineer Nick Silverman, chief scientist at Bay Area water-risk analysis firm Waterplan, which counts major companies including Facebook parent Meta of Menlo Park — which, like Google, has its headquarters at close to sea level near the San Francisco Bay — among its customers.

From 2000 to 2021, California and the southwestern U.S. have seen the driest 22-year period since at least 800 A.D., “which may be a harbinger of more global warming-fueled extreme megadrought in the future,” according to a December paper in the journal Nature co-written by former NASA senior water scientist and Waterplan adviser Jay Famiglietti. “Stress on groundwater resources under these drying conditions will likely increase in the coming decades, and will be exacerbated by the need to provide more water and produce more food for a growing population.” Recent torrential storms notwithstanding, almost half of long-parched California remained under severe drought as of Jan. 10, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Waterplan uses data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, a program known as GRACE. Variations in the relative positions of the program’s pair of satellites reflect gravity’s pull, and the amount of pull can be analyzed to provide information about where water, including snow and ice, lies on and under the earth. Waterplan, headquartered in San Francisco and launched in 2020, has analyzed every watershed on Earth.

Satellite data, supplemented with information from other sources including client companies, allows Waterplan to calculate a firm’s risks related to water supply, water quality, and flooding, along with hazards associated with regulation and corporate reputation.

The Bay Area News Group asked Silverman about Waterplan’s work. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What types of business are affected by water risk?

A: Every type of business. It’s more like, ‘Is it direct or indirect?’ Maybe it’s a supply chain kind of issue, where it’s not your water risk where you’re located but it’s that supply chain: Where do you get your products from? We use water in so many different ways, we use if for cooling in data centers, we use it for energy generation. And of course we use it in agriculture. I’m not aware of a major economic sector that shouldn’t be concerned. Any company has water risk that they should be concerned about.

Q: How does water risk affect a business?

A: If a facility does not have access to water, let’s say, that can be either their water runs out, or water quality decreases … it’s a financial risk. The water risk itself can be translated to financial risk through some fairly simple calculations which I think can hit home for a lot of corporations. You use 100 gallons to produce 100 units of such and such, you sell each unit for this amount, you can calculate how much a gallon of water is worth.

Q: How large a market does Waterplan see in California for its services?

A: The market in California is huge. California’s economy is hugely based on water. I don’t need to tell you how important agriculture is for the state… also all the data centers out there and technology centers. Fifty percent of the state uses groundwater as a water supply, and it’s difficult to track groundwater availability and changes. A third of California’s water supply comes from snowpack. Tracking the amount of water that’s way up in the mountains, oftentimes inaccessible, and also stored deeply underground, which is really hard to track … becomes really critical in terms of California understanding its water.

Q: What are the causes of water risk in California beyond consumption exceeding supply?

A: We can’t forget about water quality as aquifers deplete. Contaminants that are in those aquifers get more concentrated. You also get intrusion in a lot of places of water from the ocean. Saltwater is flowing into the groundwater.

Q: How do you assess water risk?

A: We define it as the combination of hazard exposure and vulnerability. Flooding is a really good example. What’s the probability of magnitude of a flood event? Is your facility located within a flood plain? (What is) the value of infrastructure that’s exposed? Do you have some sort of coping mechanisms if your facility gets flooded? We then break down hazard exposure and vulnerability into indicators that we can capture from hydrologic models or satellite imagery, and also facility-level information that our client provides.

A: California leads the way in water research and science but a lot of that sort of lives in academia or big institutions. There’s tremendous opportunity to connect this available science with the on-the-ground users of water, to make science accessible to the folks that need it to make informed decisions.

Name: Nick SilvermanTitle: Head of science at WaterplanAge: 44Education: PhD in regional hydroclimatology, University of Montana; master’s in engineering, University of Washington; Bachelor’s in physics and engineering, Washington and Lee UniversityFamily: Married 13 years; 8-year-old daughterBorn in: Gainesville, FloridaCity of residence: Missoula, Montana

———————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Five things about Nick Silverman:

1: My favorite thing to do is play in or on top of water: surfing, kayaking, stand-up paddle-boarding or just jumping into a mountain stream on a hot day.

2: I love to read all types of books, especially sci-fi.

3: I have become rather passionate about trying to hunt and harvest my own meat and fish. It has taught me invaluable lessons on land and wildlife conservation, food ethics, and humility.

4: I like to travel by foot, bike, or my pickup truck — planes not so much.

5: I view food in a very utilitarian way. I like to eat healthy things but my wife is the foodie.

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. 

The San Lorenzo River at Big Trees, near Henry Cowell State Park, rose to 24.51 feet by 7:30 a.m. — 8 feet over its flood stage and the second-highest level recorded since modern records began in 1937.

Only during legendary floods in January 1982, when the river hit 28.8 feet and 10 people were killed in a mudslide at Love Creek near Ben Lomond, has the river run higher. More rain was forecast Tuesday and this weekend.

“In this drought era, a lot of folks in California may have forgotten just how significant the storms can get at times — how much water can fall from the sky over a relatively short period of time,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.

The National Weather Service issued a flood watch until Tuesday afternoon covering the Bay Area, Monterey Bay region and Sacramento Valley.

State officials said that storms since Dec. 31 have steadily boosted reservoir levels. Due to three years of severe drought, many of the largest, such as Shasta and Oroville, are rising but still remained at below-average levels, which was helping reduce flood risk.

“We have a lot of room to absorb these storms that are coming in,” said John Yarbrough, assistant deputy director of the California Department of Water Resources.

But the storms, blamed for 12 deaths around the state since New Year’s Eve, found a bull’s eye early Monday morning on the Monterey Bay Area.

With water just inches from the bottom of two bridges in Felton, including the historic 1892-era Covered Bridge, Santa Cruz County officials ordered the Felton Grove neighborhood and the Paradise Park area down river near Santa Cruz evacuated.

Sonia Rojas, who works at the Wild Roots natural foods store along the river bank, watched massive logs sail downstream from the Graham Hill Road bridge near the store before it opened.

“I’ve been working here for seven years and never seen it like that,” said Rojas, 44.

Scotts Valley Water District General Manager David McNair stood alongside Rojas, unable to get to work after flooding submerged the Mount Hermon Road intersection between Felton and Scotts Valley.

“There’s literally no way out of the valley right now,” McNair said. “We got so much rain last night it was astonishing.”

VIDEO: Rescues on Highway 101, Flooding across the Bay Area

It came as flood waters from Uvas Creek spilled their banks, flooding houses on the 4000 block of Monterey Road, near Highway 101. The occupants of the houses had already left their residences by the time emergency crews arrived, according to Josh Shifrin, a Cal Fire battalion chief in Santa Clara County.

For the 24 hours ending at 5 p.m. Monday, Boulder Creek and Ben Lomond, the watershed for the San Lorenzo River, received more than 4 inches of rain. Over the past week, the area has received 11 inches. When all that water pours through the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it emerges in Felton before flowing through downtown Santa Cruz, which is protected by levees, to the Pacific Ocean.

Smaller but significant rainfall amounts also fell across the rest of the region. San Francisco received 1.44 inches, Oakland 1.8 inches and downtown San Jose .95 inches in the 24 hours ending at 5 p.m. Monday. Higher elevations took the brunt of the storm, with Mount Diablo in Contra Costa County receiving 2 inches, Middle Peak in Marin County getting 3.01 inches, and Mining Ridge in Big Sur receiving a staggering 12.25 inches.

The San Lorenzo River at Third and Riverside in Santa Cruz. Tons of debris. Likely going higher. pic.twitter.com/Xyj0itNjEi

— Jim Cantore (@JimCantore) January 9, 2023

Along the Pajaro River in Watsonville, Maria Corbera, 60, left her tent at a homeless encampment on the far side of the river at 2 a.m. Monday. Before dawn, as flood waters were rising, she went back for her cat “Baby,” wading through chest-deep water.

“My house is in the water, but I saved my cat,” she said. “I just care about my kitty.”

Across the Bay Area, where hillsides were saturated, nervous water managers, public safety officials and residents watched rivers rise.

The Guadalupe River in San Jose nearly hit its flood stage Monday morning but did not have significant flooding. Similarly, the Russian River at Guerneville was forecast to hit 33 feet by early Tuesday morning, 1 foot above flood stage but far short of the all-time record 49 feet.

On the edge of downtown San Jose, the Guadalupe spilled into an overflow channel designed to prevent the area from the flooding.

“The whole system is working good right now,” said Steve Holmes, executive director of the South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition, who stood on St. John Street observing the roiling brown waters.

Watching the brimming Guadalupe River near the historic Henry’s Hi-Life bar on the edge of downtown San Jose, Mike Wright, 69, recalled the devastating flooding in 1995. At the time, he was drinking beer at another bar nearby at Julian and Montgomery, Greg’s Ballroom.

“The water came up to the threshold,” he said. “So what do you do? You order another pitcher.”

Emergency officials were carefully monitoring burn scars and mudslide risk statewide. In Montecito, near Santa Barbara, the sheriff evacuated 10,000 people, five years after a mudslide killed 23 people and destroyed more than 100 homes in 2017.

The Sierra Nevada was expected to get at least 3 feet of new snow by Tuesday. Flood concerns also were rising in the Sacramento Valley, where the Sacramento River spilled over protective weirs into bypass channels. State officials said they had distributed 180,000 sandbags to flood-prone communities and were helping shore up levees on the Pajaro River in Watsonville, Bear Creek in Merced County and the Cosumnes River in Sacramento County.

Sunday night, President Biden approved an emergency declaration for California at the request of Gov. Gavin Newsom, which directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide resources and coordinate disaster relief efforts.

Monday was not a good day to be driving. Near Gilroy, Uvas Creek sent flood waters knee deep across the four lanes of Highway 101, stranding several cars and blocking traffic by noon.

“It’s like the Philippines right here, bro,” said Richard Barcellano, whose Lexus ISF sports car needed a push out of the water. “TikTok this!”

Along the coast, businesses owners continued to mop up in Capitola Village after record waves smashed a 40-foot hole in Capitola Wharf late last week and flooded waterfront restaurants.

In the nearby town of Soquel, Ashley and Derek Harper evacuated their creekside home and the houses of their neighbors on Wharf Road, with their baby Lydia, for the second time since New Year’s Eve when the town’s main street was left underwater.

By 9 a.m. Monday, the Harpers’ ground-floor studio, workshop and garage were filled with two feet of muddy water from Soquel Creek. A sheriff’s deputy had come knocking around 5 a.m. telling them to leave.

“About 45 minutes later, the water was at the front step,” said Derek Harper, 45, a solar services technician. “We had bags packed already.”

In Paradise Park, a community in redwood forest just north of Santa Cruz, the San Lorenzo River pounded a section of road into rubble, flooded at least a dozen homes and swept a tree trunk into the historic covered bridge, built in 1872, shearing off one of two posts holding the span up above the river.

Retired UC Santa Cruz librarian Joanne Nelson said her riverfront house was flooded on the bottom level, with floodwater washing away the sandbags she’d put in front of the downstairs bedroom and breaking the door. “It invited itself in, big time,” said Nelson, 80.

Mudslides closed portions of Highway 9, snarled traffic on Highway 17 and closed parts of Highway 37 in Marin County. Caltrans closed Highway 84 in Niles Canyon east of Fremont, and Highway 1 in Big Sur from Ragged Point in San Luis Obispo County, to Palo Colorado in the north. And more rain is on the way Tuesday and this weekend.

“We see a couple more on the horizon, so we will be in this state for quite a bit,” said Karla Nemeth, director of the state Department of Water Resources.

Staff writer Jason Green contributed to this report.

The town’s 855-foot-long wooden wharf, a popular spot for fishing and sightseeing, was cleaved in half from pounding waves the day before that smashed wooden pilings and decking. Well-known waterfront restaurants sat behind emergency fencing in various states of damage from storm surges that broke through windows and undermined building foundations.

Most of the village, just 13 feet above sea level, remained without power all day Friday.

“The damage throughout Capitola and the village is absolutely devastating,” said Santa Cruz County Supervisor Zach Friend. “You’ve got iconic locations that were significantly damaged, locally owned businesses that are red-tagged, and a wharf that will take millions to rebuild to its previous state.

“The rebuilding process and healing the emotional scars will take a long time.”

Adding to the grief: City officials had been planning in recent years a $7 million project to shore up and strengthen the Capitola Wharf by widening it, installing fiberglass pilings and taking other steps to harden it against major storms, particularly in an era of rising seas amid climate change.

They had delayed work several times seeking additional federal funding. But the ocean didn’t wait.

In a bitter irony, on Friday, U.S. Rep. Jimmy Panetta, D-Monterey, announced that after two years of trying, he had secured the city’s request of $3.5 million to fully fund the job when President Biden signed a federal spending bill on Dec. 29.

Panetta said Friday that the money can be used to help repair the beloved wharf.

“These are special places, and they deserve the type of attention we need to give them to rebuild,” he said.

Crews continued to remove mud, sand and debris from the village and from around the colorful Venetian apartments across Soquel Creek, many of which also suffered damage from water and debris. City officials were worried about another powerful storm expected to hit Sunday night.

Debris could pile up at the creek’s mouth, flooding the village, Capitola Police Chief Andrew Dally said.

“Each new event creates its own challenges,” he said.

Three miles down the coast, destruction more serious than previously thought was coming to light at Seacliff State Beach, another popular attraction for thousands of visitors a year.

All 60 of the oceanfront campsites, so popular they are booked nearly solid 365 days a year, were badly damaged, said Chris Spohrer, superintendent of state parks’ Santa Cruz District.

“Many of them were completely destroyed,” Spohrer said. “The picnic tables. The hookups. The asphalt. The restrooms were severely damaged. We saw inundation. Doors were broken off with driftwood. The tide came all the way up to the base of the cliff. It destroyed a good portion of the seawall.”

The visitor center and museum was unharmed, he said. Half of the park’s wooden pier fell into the ocean, and the 1920s era “cement ship,” wrecked by storms in 2017 and before, was further battered. The road into New Brighton State Beach nearby also was damaged, Spohrer added. Both parks remained closed until at least next week.

Dozens of homes in the Rio Del Mar area also suffered flood damage, authorities said.

The Capitola waterfront, well-known to weekend visitors from the Bay Area who pack beaches on warm days, endured its worst storm damage since January of 1982 and 1983 when gales tore a similar hole in the wharf and sent mud and debris through the streets.

Three of the eight restaurants on Capitola Village’s oceanfront were red-tagged Friday with severe damage and no entry permitted — Zelda’s, The Sand Bar and Paradise Beach Grille. Five were yellow-tagged, with city officials allowing limited entry for the proprietors of Tacos Moreno, My Thai Beach, Pizza My Heart, Margaritaville and Capitola Bar & Grill.

Restaurant owners had one over-riding concern: “Getting back to work when the city lets us,” said Josh Whitby, co-owner of Zelda’s, where debris including a beam from the wharf broke through the beach-facing windows and a wall, flooding the interior.

Capitola Bar & Grill, which sits on concrete unlike most of the other beachfront establishments built on pilings over the water, escaped damage, but city officials told owners Michelle and LaSalle Strong that the city’s sewer system was damaged, potentially affecting their re-opening.

“We’re losing income every day,” Michelle Strong said. “Our staff are losing income every day.”

Capitola City Manager Jamie Goldstein said that he didn’t yet have a damage estimate, but the city was working on compiling one.

Asked about decisions the city council made in 2021 and again this past July to delay some renovation work on the wharf to seek more funding for a more expansive project, Goldstein noted that the city replaced corroding steel pilings in December 2021 at the end of the wharf. This week’s storm was so powerful that the broader job planned — new wooden decking, new fiberglass pilings, a wider wharf and restrooms — could well have been damaged also, he said, particularly if the construction, estimated to take nine months, had been underway during the storm.

“Anyone can armchair quarterback,” he said. “Whether or not we were lucky or unlikely we did it that way, I don’t know. But it’s where we are.”

He said the town, which suffered similar damage in 1983, 1982, 1955 and 1913, will bounce back.

“I think it’s going to surprise us all,” Goldstein said. “I think we are going to get it done faster than anyone expects. Capitola has pulled through before.”

In the nearby beach town of Rio del Mar, waves carrying logs and debris crashed over a sea wall and bashed into a string of beachfront homes. Roiling waves swallowed up more of the landmark cement ship and the pier leading to it, chronic victims of past storms. And at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk just up the coast, the raging San Lorenzo River that spills into the Pacific exposed the base of the Logger’s Revenge flume ride, washing away boulders that had protected it.

In Capitola, the gaping hole in the 855-foot pier completely cut off from shore the popular Wharf House restaurant perched at the end of it. Its fate remained perilous Thursday as powerful waves blasted fountains of whitewater between the timbers holding it up.

“They’re just such iconic places for all of us,” said Scott Cheney, who ventured out from his Seacliff home Thursday morning to survey the damage along the coast. “It’s sad to see them ruined and wonder if they’ll ever be rebuilt.”

The damage was wrought by near record-breaking waves that pounded the coast Thursday morning, coinciding with fierce onshore winds and a high 5.7 foot tide. The waves, many measuring a stunning 25 feet from crest to trough, were created by sea swells produced hundreds of miles out to sea by storm winds.

“They’re some of the largest waves I’ve ever seen to break along our shoreline,” said UC Santa Cruz oceanography professor Gary Griggs, who has been studying the coastal region for 55 years.

The winds are so strong and the swell is so large, he said, that the waves are pushing up against the bluffs.

“As sea level gets higher, the waves hit the base of those cliffs and bluffs more often, and with more energy,” he said.

All of Capitola Village’s waterfront restaurants, including local landmark Zelda’s, were inundated by the raging ocean, Capitola police Capt. Sarah Ryan said.

At The Sand Bar, waves were still pounding into the restaurant and pushing up the floorboards when owners Minna and Jeff Lantis arrived Thursday.

“The floor literally went up like you’re on a trampoline,” Minna Lantis said. Their seaside seating was torn away, and the building appeared to have suffered severe structural damage.

“We used to have music here five nights a week,” she said, choking up. “It’s the worst thing I’ve seen in my life.”

Just up the beach, many of the historic Venetian Court bungalows — built in 1924 and painted bright colors from fuchsia to canary yellow — also suffered tremendous damage. Waterborne logs bludgeoned the front of a beachfront teal blue home, leaving the living room completely open to the elements.

Joan Downey, whose family has owned a bright pink home next door since 1972, said it appeared to have been rammed by a couple of logs, but with storm windows put up on Tuesday, they were hoping for the best inside. The row of houses hasn’t suffered this kind of trauma since the storms of 1982, when Downey remembers cleaning up and finding a dead seal in the back of the house.

“I can’t believe what this is going to do with the wharf. So many people fish there — this is going to be devastating for the restaurants,” Downey said. “This isn’t something you just piece back together quickly. It just breaks my heart.”

In Santa Cruz, parts of the popular sidewalk along West Cliff Drive collapsed as waves pummeled the manmade rocky riprap below. The scenic 3-mile walking and biking route was cordoned off for safety.

Despite images of the San Lorenzo River washing past the log ride at the Beach Boardwalk, amusement park spokeswoman Kris Reyes said there did not appear to be significant damage.

“There’s a little bit of wear and tear, things getting knocked over,” Reyes said. “But nothing structurally. None of the rides are impacted. None of the facilities are impacted.”

In Capitola, Bay Bar and Grill owner Patrick Lynn, who moved from Oakland 12 years ago to pursue his restaurant dreams, watched from across the street Thursday as giant waves crashed into the windows.

“I walked into my bar for two seconds to take some video, and I got so scared I walked right out,” he said.

The floor is destroyed, and possibly the pilings that hold up the restaurant over the water, he said. He has eight years left on his lease and fears he’ll never be able to re-open.

“I’ve lost everything,” Lynn said. “What do you do when you’ve lost your purpose?”

Utility crews raced to restore power to large chunks of the Bay Area as officials in the region’s urban centers reported hundreds of downed trees and numerous washed-out roads from the latest powerful atmospheric river to roar ashore this week. To the west — most notably in Capitola and Rio del Mar along the Santa Cruz coast — one of the largest storm surges in recent memory caused significant damage to waterfront businesses and tourist attractions.

The damage assessments came as meteorologists warned of more rain in the forecast over the next several days, with a parade of storms marching across the Pacific Ocean toward Northern California promising to further inundate the Bay Area this weekend and early next week.

“Be ready for more heavy rainfall with high probability of flooding, especially as we go into early next week,” said Rick Canepa, a National Weather Service meteorologist. “Just be prepared, try to do as much storm prep as you can. I know it’s a bit relentless.”

Unlike previous systems to hit the region over the last couple of weeks, the storm that hit Wednesday and Thursday brought punishing winds that gusted to 101 mph in central Marin County on Wednesday evening. In Oakland and San Francisco, the wind gusts of about 60 mph tore through each city — dislodging drought-weakened trees into power lines and onto roadways.

Across the state, some 440,000 Pacific Gas & Electric customers lost power during the storm, the utility provider announced. By Thursday afternoon, 115,000 people remained in the dark, a figure that was expected to drop to 75,000 by the end of the day. In the Bay Area, more than 66,000 people remained without power at 2 p.m. Thursday, including about 24,000 people in the North Bay and 17,000 people in the Peninsula. Another 15,000 people remained in the dark in the East Bay, while nearly 8,000 people were left without power in the South Bay. About 2,200 people were without power in San Francisco.

Authorities in the North Bay blamed the storm for two fatalities, one of them a toddler. The 2-year-old boy, who has not been identified, died in the Sonoma County town of Occidental on Wednesday night after a tree fell into a mobile home, Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sgt. Juan Valencia said Thursday.

The boy was sitting on the couch in the living room at about 5:15 a.m. when he was crushed, Valencia said. Fire paramedics tried to revive the child with CPR and other live-saving efforts, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.

A 19-year-old woman also died Wednesday morning when her vehicle hydroplaned on a standing patch of water and slammed into a pole in Fairfield, local authorities said.

The potent system was fueled by a “bomb cyclone” — a swirling area of intense low pressure that churned in the Pacific before slamming into the West Coast, sending a swell of moisture into California that was accompanied by dangerously strong winds.

The storm dropped 4 to 6 inches of rain in the Santa Cruz Mountains and 1 to 2 inches across much of the rest of the Bay Area, including San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco.

Across the Peninsula, the East Bay and the South Bay, local emergency response officials voiced relief that their most dire fears about the storm failed to materialize. Even so, they raced to make repairs ahead of the next deluge.

“Overall, we’ve fared pretty well,” said Leslie Arroyo, a spokesperson for the City of South San Francisco, after the community largely endured only downed trees and a toppled gas station canopy. “We’re pleased with how things have been very minimal.”

In East Palo Alto, workers drained water from the large subterranean garage at the 160-unit Woodland Park Apartments, where cars flooded up to their wheel wells Saturday. Shoveling deep mud from an adjacent sidewalk, one worker, who asked not to be identified, said that “it’s a lot of work — it’s extensive.”

Almost 300 trees fell in San Francisco over a 24-hour period ending at 6 a.m. Thursday, according to Department of Public Works spokesperson Rachel Gordon. In the West Portal neighborhood, one of those trees knocked down 500 feet of bus lines, forcing riders to be rerouted while crews worked to restore service.

In East Oakland, a roughly 40-foot section of a eucalyptus tree fell on a two-story, eight-unit apartment complex Wednesday evening at the end of Lynde Street, along Peralta Creek. The hole allowed rain to pour in and flood the homes, forcing the complex to be evacuated.

As daylight broke Thursday, Victoria James marveled at how her family narrowly avoided tragedy. A 10-year resident of the building, James recalled being with six other members of her family in their second-floor unit when they felt a strong shaking and saw the lights go out.

“We thought it was a 6.9 earthquake,” said James, 39, after getting her first daylight look at the damage. “We had to leave right away because the tree was going to block the door. We left with what was on our backs.”

James, like several of her other neighbors, had moved to a local hotel with hotel with her family — and she shuddered at how they narrowly avoided tragedy.

“These trees should have been cut down a long time ago,” James said. She and another decade-long resident, Patty Bigornia, voiced concerns that local officials did not do enough to mitigate the tree risk, despite residents having raised concerns about it in the past.

“I’m just glad nobody was hurt,” said Bigornia, 54. “But this was 100% preventable.”

Several roads remained washed out or closed due to debris Thursday, including nearly a dozen in Santa Clara County.

The next round of rain should arrive late Friday evening, dropping light to moderate rain through the weekend, said Canepa. A second, more powerful atmospheric river should arrive late Sunday night — bringing even more potential for flooding to the waterlogged Bay Area.

“Everything is saturated. The soils can’t really handle hardly any more,” Canepa said.

Lisa Krieger and Gabriel Greschler contributed to this report. 

Holmes, pregnant and the mother of a young son, was given a reprieve after being sentenced in November in U.S. District Court in San Jose to more than 11 years in prison. In handing down her sentence, Judge Edward Davila deferred the start of Holmes’ incarceration until April 27 in a decision legal experts believe was intended to allow her to give birth before she’s locked up.

Convicted in January 2021 by a jury on four counts of defrauding investors in her now-defunct Palo Alto blood-testing startup out of more than $144 million, Holmes in December appealed the jury’s finding and Davila’s sentence. In a court filing, she claimed up to 10 reasons why she should be granted a new trial, saying the “complex, hard-fought, multi-month trial with numerous witnesses and hundreds of exhibits” left a court record “teeming with issues for appeal.” The filing highlighted Holmes’ acquittal on charges of defrauding patients who paid for Theranos tests.

Three days after filing her notice of appeal, Holmes asked Davila to allow her to remain free until the appeal is over, which legal experts believe could take more than a year.

On Friday, a joint filing between prosecutors and Holmes’ nine-lawyer team revealed that the prosecution plans to oppose her motion to remain free on bail until her appeal is over. The filing set Jan. 19 as the deadline for prosecutors to file the “Government’s opposition to (Holmes’) motion for release pending appeal.” The two sides have asked Davila to schedule a hearing on the matter for March 17.

Holmes is not an obvious flight risk or threat to public safety, former Santa Clara County prosecutor Steven Clark said. But Clark added that government prosecutors may argue that she’s trying to delay her imprisonment and needs to start being held accountable for her crimes.

Holmes, a Stanford University dropout, founded Theranos at age 19. At its peak, the startup was valued at $9 billion, based on Holmes’ false claims that her technology could conduct a full range of tests using a few drops of blood. A series of Wall Street Journal exposés led to federal charges and the company’s 2018 demise.

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.