Storm passes through — wait, there’s more
After brief respite from wind, rains, you’d better ‘keep those umbrellas at hand’
Days after frigid storms dusted surrounding mountains with snow, the Bay Area got another kind of soaking Wednesday from an “atmospheric river” that sent balmy southerly breezes through Monterey, set a daily rainfall record in San Francisco and swelled North Bay rivers.
Much of the rainfall and strong gusty winds arrived Wednesday morning, snarling morning commutes, delaying flights, toppling trees and spawning scattered power outages, washouts, sinkholes, mudslides and local roadway flooding.
Most of the storm had moved through the Bay Area by Wednesday afternoon. But the National Weather Service expected bands of rain to continue moving ashore throughout
Wednesday evening and on through the weekend with sometimes heavy showers before clearing Sunday evening and into Monday.
“Keep those umbrellas at hand because they’re likely to still be needed,” said weather service meteorologist Scott Rowe. “The main aspect of the atmospheric river has come and gone, but there’s plenty of moisture still offshore that’s expected to make its way through our area.”
The weather service announced a coastal flood advisory from 4 to 8 a.m. today for the Bay Area shoreline as well as coastal North Bay locations.
The rural Sonoma County town of Venado about 12 miles west of Healdsburg — regularly one of the wettest places around the Bay Area in winter — notched the highest 24-hour rainfall total of 6.08 inches by 2 p.m. Wednesday, Rowe said. Much of the rain drenched the North Bay, with the Santa Rosa airport reporting 3.37 inches, he said.
But downtown San Francisco saw 2.4 inches, bursting a Feb. 13 record for the city of 2.08 inches in 2000, Rowe said.
The coastal mountain areas also got a good soaking, with 3.45 inches at Ben Lomond Mountain and 2.64 inches at Bates Creek, both in the area surrounding Santa Cruz, Rowe said. Elsewhere, however, the “rain shadow” effect eased the rains, he said. By 2 p.m., Oakland got 1.48 inches and San Jose 0.25 inch at their airports, he said.
Roger Gass, a meteorologist with the weather service, said this storm is a “typical” atmospheric river setup, where cities in the South Bay “see significantly less rainfall” than the North Bay and coastal mountains.
In the Sierra Nevada, heavy, wet snow was expected from 7,000 to 8,000 feet as the storm system moved east, with heavy rain coupled with periods of snow below 7,000 feet, according to the weather service in Reno. That added to what already has been a bountiful snow season for skiers and snowboarders able to manage the winter road conditions for the upcoming President’s Day weekend.
“This has been a really good winter,” said Kevin “Coop” Cooper, communications manager for Heavenly and Kirkwood Mountain Resorts. “The skiing and riding conditions are going to be some of best in the past decade. Anywhere you go it’s going to be game on!”
The Russian, Napa and Guadalupe rivers were expected to reach flood stage by Friday. The Russian
River in Guerneville was at 19.5 feet Wednesday afternoon and was expected to reach as high as 37.8 feet, with flood stage at 32 feet. The Napa River in Napa was at 16 feet Wednesday afternoon and expected to reach just above its 25-foot flood stage. In San Jose, the Guadalupe River was at 4.2 feet Wednesday afternoon but forecast to hit 8.6 feet by Friday, just over its 8.5foot flood stage.
With memories still fresh from the devastating flooding along Coyote Creek in San Jose in 2017, city officials were taking precautions.
“Certainly there were lessons learned,” said Mayor Sam Liccardo, regarding the 2017 Coyote Creek flood that forced 14,000 people to flee their homes, caused $100 million in damage and revealed problems with the city’s emergency response plans. “We are much further
along than we were in 2017.”
Since then, Liccardo said, the city has expanded outreach to community groups, encouraged people to join AlertSCC, the emergency notification system, stepped up coordination with the Santa Clara Valley Water District, tested its loudspeaker warning system and organized multilingual teams of city employees.
Anderson Reservoir was around 35 percent full Tuesday morning, said Linda LeZotte, the chair of the water district board, much lower than in previous years because water has been released throughout the week.
LeZotte acknowledged that some of the creek embankments are strewn with debris from homeless encampments that could exacerbate flooding issues. Teams were doing their best to remove trash, and
the city’s housing department has sent staffers to the creek embankments to offer resources and urge homeless people to move away from the water. But often encampments that move reappear elsewhere, she said.
City Manager David Sykes said the city is coordinating earlier and much more closely with the water district.
Wednesday’s storm brought “some of the strongest wind speeds I’ve seen so far in populated areas,” Rowe said. Monterey airport saw gusts up to 59 mph, San Francisco’s airport reported gusts up to 46 mph, and offshore gusts in Monterey Bay reached 56 mph Wednesday afternoon. Exposed peaks saw even stronger wind gusts — 75 mph at Mount St. Helena’s 4,300-foot peak, and 61 mph at Mt. Diablo.
Rowe said it hit 70 degrees in Monterey. “We got these strong southerly downslope winds that cause air to warm,” Rowe said from the weather service’s Monterey office. “It’s warm and windy here (and) feels almost tropical.”
Fears of mudslides prompted Caltrans to keep sections of Highway 1 closed south of Big Sur.
The extremely wet start to 2019 in Northern California has allowed most cities to overcome early season rainfall deficits. Through Monday, most cities were at or near their historical averages for this time of year, including San Francisco (13.72 inches, 90 percent of average), Oakland (10.84 inches or 85 percent) and San Jose (9.27 inches, 98 percent).
On Wednesday, the Sierra Nevada snowpack measured 129 percent of historical average for this time of year. That number likely will jump, with a series of storms forecast to impact the Sierra Nevada through the weekend.
For Californians still stinging from a record fiveyear drought earlier this decade, that was a welcome relief.
“It’s beautiful,” said John Hart of Fremont as he walked his yellow Labrador, Annie, along the Alameda Creek Trail on Wednesday during a break in the rain. “It’s especially nice because the hills are so green.”
Not everyone was thrilled with the wet weather, though.
“It’s rough out here, man,” said Steve Branche, 57, a homeless man living in Fremont and sitting underneath the overhang of a public restroom in a park, leaning on a bag of his clothes and listening to a sports radio show. “There’s not a lot of places to get out of the rain around here.”