Bay Area storm: Tens of thousands without power as damage assessments begin
A day after a powerful atmospheric river storm roared ashore in Northern California, Bay Area emergency crews and residents on Thursday began assessing the damage from their latest bout of wind and rain.
Tens of thousands of people woke up without power Thursday after a punishing, deadly storm that rattled the Bay Area, felling trees, closing some roadways and schools and reportedly resulting in at least two deaths in the North Bay.
A day after the powerful atmospheric river storm roared ashore, emergency crews and residents on Thursday began assessing the damage wrought from the third such system to hit the Bay Area and Northern California in a little more than a week.
Still, even as the true toll of the storm remained unclear at daybreak Thursday, meteorologists warned that more rain was likely on the way as part of a parade of storms that could continue into next week.
In the Bay Area, slightly more than 80,000 customers were without power as of 5:45 a.m., according to utility Pacific Gas & Electric. Most of those outages were in the Peninsula, where 34,754 customers were waiting for power to return. Two separate power outages were responsible for at least 10,000 of those outages. The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office said another 2,300 lost power after power lines fell near Brewster Avenue in Redwood City.
Elsewhere around the region, 22,770 customers in the North Bay were without power, as were 11,920 customers in the South Bay. Another 7,703 East Bay customers were without power.
Authorities in the North Bay blamed the storm on two fatalities, one of them a toddler. The child was killed when a tree fell into a home in the Sonoma County town of Occidental, according to news reports by ABC7 and KTVU.
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.
It’s all from a potent system 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 the California that was accompanied by dangerously strong winds.
Among the places hardest hit by rain were Loma Prieta in the Santa Cruz mountains, which received 3.39 inches of rain in a 24-hour period ending at 5 a.m. Thursday. Also in the South Bay, Mt. Umunhum received 3.31 inches.
Rainfall totals elsewhere in the Bay Area ranged from 1 to 2 inches, with Mountain View receiving about 1.6 inches, San Francisco International Airport receiving 1.64 inches and Oakland International Airport measuring 1.33 inches as of 5 a.m. Thursday. Dublin measured 1.24 inches of new rainfall and San Jose received 0.98 inches.
The rain and powerful winds prompted the closure of South San Francisco Unified School District campuses on Thursday, while snarling traffic in some parts of the Bay Area. BART reported several delays and disruptions, including to its Red and Green lines.
But in many parts of the Bay Area, impacts from the storm appeared more limited. The Oakland Unified School District, for example, notified parents late Wednesday night that its schools would be open on Thursday.
The Santa Clara Unified School District said all but one of its schools would be open Thursday, after weather forecasts showed the heaviest parts of the storm having passed. The lone exception was Ponderosa Elementary School on Ponderosa Avenue, which remained closed because of power outages at the campus.
Check back for updates to this developing story. Staff writers Rick Hurd and Jason Green contributed to this report.