SAN JOSE, Calif. — The San Francisco Bay Area began cleaning up Thursday from a punishing storm that left tens of thousands of people in the dark, flooded coastal businesses and killed two people, even as two more atmospheric river storms line up in the Pacific, poised to hit California in the coming days.
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 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.
On Mines Road about 20 miles south of Livermore, the roadway was closed at the Alameda-Santa Clara county line as rushing water flowed over. That was to keep motorists from encountering the worst of it — two miles south, a section of the road was missing. At least a half-dozen other sections of the road were underneath deep moving water, some of it coming from the Arroyo Mocho that runs alongside the roadway.
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.
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(Mercury News staff writers Lisa Krieger and Gabriel Greschler contributed to this report.)
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