Storms wreak havoc
‘Pineapple Express’ brings heavy rain, strong winds to area
Winter’s wet rampage continued Thursday as another wave of storms saturated an already-soggy Bay Area, tumbling trees, triggering mudslides, snarling traffic and shutting down schools from Marin County to the Santa Cruz Mountains.
The destructive weather also contributed to a deadly accident: A construction worker who was helping clear a mudslide from earlier this week on Highway 17 near Scotts Valley was killed when he was hit by a dump truck working at the site, and another worker was injured
and taken to the hospital, the California Highway Patrol said.
A CHP spokeswoman who was giving media interviews about the cleanup was alerted to the tragedy when a passing motorist screamed: “Somebody’s been hit! Somebody’s been hit!”
The accident added a new dimension to the toll of winter storms that have caused widespread flooding and damage but also replenished California with record rainfall after five years of drought.
Across the Bay Area, weary homeowners near creeks and rivers shoveled away mud, watched water levels nervously and filled sandbags.
“The ground is already super saturated,” said Steve Anderson, a forecaster with the National Weather Service. “The water is still flowing out of the hills from the storm on Tuesday.”
In the East Bay, building officials red-tagged a home on Van Tassel Lane in Orinda, after a mudslide that slammed into it Tuesday worsened and caused more damage on Thursday.
“I was blocked into the master bathroom, and I had to crawl out over the pile of rubble,” said homeowner Paul Vittimberga, who was uninjured.
When the rain started just before noon Thursday in Felton, Nathalie Dervaux almost cried.
On Tuesday, the San Lorenzo River had overflowed into her driveway, filling the basement of the home she shares with her two teenage children with eight feet of water.
Her daughter Amberlee, 17, whose bedroom is in the basement, had managed to get out of the home just in time.
“We knew when we bought the house that it was in a flood zone, but the realtor said it was like an earthquake — it would happen once every 100 years,” said Dervaux, rolling her eyes.
“I’m just happy no one died,” she said, “and that we’re all OK.” Or, as her friend put it: “We’re not in Aleppo.”
Airports also had headaches. San Francisco International Airport had 146 flight cancellations by midafternoon Thursday, said airport spokesman Doug Yakel. Many of the cancellations involved cities in the Northeast, including Boston and New York, which have been dealing with a winter storm of their own. San Jose, which had three cancellations, and Oakland, which had none, experienced only modest delays.
Marin County Office of Education Assistant Superintendent Ken Lippi said 40 of the 80 public schools closed, affecting about 16,000 students. Schools also were closed in the San Lorenzo Valley area of the Santa Cruz Mountains, due to flood risk and relentless mudslides that blocked mountain roads.
Crews halted work to clear the massive slide on Highway 17’s northbound lane after Thursday’s deadly accident.
In a Facebook post, Watsonville-based construction company Granite rock identified the worker who died as Bobby Gill, 54, of Los Banos. He was a 15-year employee of the firm.
The injured worker, Stephen Whittier, 34, of San Jose, was pinned underneath the truck before being pulled free. The driver, working for Wats on villebased Hildebrand & Sons Trucking Inc., was identified as a 39-year-old Salinas man.
CHP spokeswoman Trista Drake said that it was not clear whether the truck that hit the two workers had back-up warning alarms, and that the investigation was ongoing. The cleanup on the northbound side is expected to resume on Friday.
Across California, a state that was desperate for rain for five years is now getting too much in many places.
“It’s historic,” said Bill Croyle, acting director of the State Department of Water Resources.
The rain is “setting the pace to really stress our systems,” he said, referring to a hole that emerged in the concrete spillway at Oroville reservoir in Butte County, the state’s second largest.
Engineers decided Thursday to allow water to continue to flow down the spillway, even though it was causing significant damage. But the reservoir is more than 90 percent full. Crews were busy Thursday pulling out trees from an emergency spillway, which is little more than an uninhabited hillside with trees, rocks and dirt that would cascade into the Feather River below.
On the Golden Gate Bridge, wind gusts hit 58 mph, by mid-day Thursday. But that was a slight breeze in comparison to the Sierra, where winds around the highest peaks reached 147 mph at the top of Squaw Ridge and 132 mph at Mammoth Summit, according to the National Weather Service in Reno.
Across California, rainfall totals were well above average.
The precipitation amount so far this winter in the 8station Northern Sierra Index, a key collection of rain gauges from Lake Tahoe to the Mount Shasta area in the watersheds above many of California’s largest reservoirs, stood at 219 percent of normal Thursday. That’s the highest ever recorded since 1922 when measurements began. The 64 inches of rain that has fallen so far this winter exceeds the 50inch yearly average with eight months left in the recording period.
Along the coast, the first round of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am was delayed Thursday afternoon, then canceled, as strong winds and rains flooded greens and made Pebble Beach, Spyglass Hill and Monterey Peninsula Country Club unplayable. Organizers of the famed celebrity tournament planned to try again Friday.
The Pineapple Express storm that hit the Bay Area is a type of “atmospheric river” that gets its name from the plume of moisture coming from Hawaii into California, said Brian Mejia, a meteorologist with the weather service.
By 3 p.m. Thursday, the North Bay hills and coastal ranges had received between 2 and 3 inches of rain, but areas subject to the “rain shadow effect,” a condition in which a mountain range causes prevailing winds to drop their moisture before reaching a nearby area, received less. San Jose, for example, received 0.3 of an inch. Oakland received 0.53 of an inch, San Francisco 0.67, and Richmond 1.07.
The Bay Area is expected to get a break from the rain this weekend. Cloudy conditions will return Friday, with generally sunny weather for five days until next Thursday, when another storm system is forecast to come in. Weekend temperatures may climb into the low 70s, said National Weather Service Forecaster Matt Mehle.
“We’re looking at what should be a rather nice weekend with abundant sunshine,” he said.