Cleanup continues with a look toward the next big storm heading our way.
Rivers surged over their banks while mudslides and fallen trees closed roads Monday, leaving little time to mop up from the weekend storm before another onslaught of heavy rain and strong winds.
Another 4 inches of rain is expected Tuesday in the North Bay and Santa Cruz Mountains. In the central Bay Area, as much as 2 inches is predicted.
In some communities, that will feel like a relative drop in the bucket compared with the 13 inches of rain that pummeled the Sonoma County hill community of Venado over a 72-hour period ending Monday at 7 a.m.
Loma Prieta in the Santa Cruz Mountains was drenched in 9.48 inches, while the town of Angwin in Napa County got 8 inches of rain. San Francisco had 2.3 inches, and Oakland and San Jose each got an inch and a half.
At least four deaths were connected to the weekend storm, including a fatal crash Monday on a rain-slicked road in Marin County. The driver, identified by the coroner as Novato resident Jose Enrique Hernandez, 20, was found dead just after 8:30 a.m. after his car flipped over a guardrail and plunged into a Novato creek.
Investigators believe Hernandez, who was last seen leaving work Sunday evening, lost control of his car on the rain-slicked road, dropping some 15 feet into the creek below, where police found the vehicle resting on its roof, according to the California Highway Patrol.
Accidents on Sunday claimed the lives of a driver whose taxicab went into the Oakland estuary and another whose car crashed on an Interstate 880 ramp in Fremont. The first fatality attributed to the storm was Saturday, when a tree fell on a San Ramon woman walking on a golf course.
Heavy rain pushed rivers and streams over their banks, including the Merced River in Yosemite National Park, the Big Sur River on the Central Coast and the Russian River near Guerneville.
After Tuesday’s storm, however, the Bay Area can expect a break.
“We’ll be drying out the rest of the week and into the weekend,” said Steve Anderson, a National Weather Service forecaster. “It’ll be a muchneeded relief for people to clean up and let the rivers and creeks recede.”
In Yosemite Valley, which was closed to visitors Friday as the storm approached, there was minor flooding from the Merced River. The storm also triggered several rock slides, including one that blocked Highway 140 into the park.
The valley was set to reopen to visitors Tuesday morning, with or without access from the two-lane highway. Campgrounds were scheduled to open Tuesday evening, with commercial lodgings and services slated to open Wednesday.
While rocks were toppling in Yosemite, fire-scorched hillsides were sliding in Big Sur. A mudslide slammed into a car and scattered coastal redwood trees and debris across Highway 1 just south of the Fernwood Resort on Monday morning. No one was injured, but the slide blocked the road for hours.
The slide occurred in an area that burned in the Soberanes Fire, which started in July and charred more than 132,000 acres before containment nearly three months later.
“The issue is that anything in a burn scar has the potential for a debris flow,” said John De Luca, California State Parks sector superintendent. “That’s always the concern after a fire. But in Big Sur that seems to be the concern in the winter period.”
James Wolfenden, 74, who lives on Rancho Rico Road south of Monday's landslide, was heading north to town on foot and climbed through the tangled redwood branches and mud that blocked the road.
“This is a constant threat,” he said, pointing to the scooped-out hillside where several scorched trees teetered. “This is what people that live here deal with.”
Farther north, a KGO-TV news van got stuck in a rock slide early Monday morning in the Santa Cruz Mountains and its driver suffered minor injuries when he was trapped inside, officials said.
The driver, whose name was not released, was headed north on Highway 17 near Vine Hill Road about 3 a.m. when an avalanche of rocks and mud came crashing down, said Officer Elizabeth Addy of the California Highway Patrol.
The van was totaled and all northbound lanes of the highway remained closed for most of Monday.
The saturated soil and winds also toppled thousands
of trees across the region, including 169 in San Francisco. Two public housing units and six cars were damaged.
The big benefit from the parade of storms is its effect on California’s droughtparched water systems. Precipitation totals up and down the state are above average for the date, with South Lake Tahoe at 220 percent of normal, Yosemite at 192 percent and San Francisco at 124 percent.
Reservoirs are showing signs of significant recovery after the state’s dry years, with many twice as full as they were last year at this time. At Lake Oroville, for example, the recent storms pushed reservoir totals up to 2.3 million acre-feet, an increase from 1.99 million acre-feet just eight days earlier.
“That’s a lot of water in a week,” said Michael Anderson, state climatologist with the Department of Water Resources.
He warned that California isn’t quite out of the dry brush yet. Santa Barbara’s Lake Cachuma, for example, with a capacity of 205,000 acre-feet, has just 16,260 acre-feet of water.
“They're not playing in the same arena that we are up north,” Anderson said. “As hard as it is to believe up here, there are places that are dry still.”