California Faces Week of Wild Weather as Hail Hits Bay Area
(Bloomberg) -- Heavy rain, snow and even hail from a weekend storm will continue to saturate California on Tuesday, with a brief respite on the horizon before the next system slams into the West Coast Thursday.
Lightning strikes knocked out power to Stanford University’s campus and other customers in the San Francisco Bay area, while pea-sized hailstones fell across Oakland and Berkeley, according to the US National Weather Service. Meanwhile, officials in Los Angeles County warned of the potential for mudslides on unstable terrain that burned in recent wildfires.
As much as 5 feet (1.5 meters) of snow has already fallen across the Sierra Nevada range, and a wide swath of western California — from north of San Francisco south to Los Angeles — has gotten between 1 to 2 inches of rain, said Bob Oravec, a senior branch forecaster at the US Weather Prediction Center. Some areas may see up to an additional 2 inches of rain by Wednesday.
Rescue crews were searching for 10 people among a group of 16 skiers caught in an avalanche near the Lake Tahoe town of Truckee, California, the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office reported on Facebook late Tuesday.
“Rescue efforts remain in progress now with 46 emergency first responders. Weather conditions remain highly dangerous,” the post said.
As thunder rolled through the Bay Area Tuesday morning, an errant bolt of lightning damaged a critical transmission line leading into Stanford’s power substation.
The resulting outages interrupted lab work and threatened to disrupt classes, according to university officials. Pacific Gas & Electric Co., which operates the line, said crews were able to reroute service and restore power within hours.
“We have seen multiple outages due to lightning strikes and in connection with the storm,” said PG&E spokesperson Stephanie Magallon, including a direct lightning strike on a transformer.
Roughly 4,000 PG&E customers in the Bay Area were without power as of 11 a.m. local time, Magallon said.
Along with the wet and snowy conditions, California and the entire US West have been buffeted by high winds with gusts of 70 miles (113 kilometers) per hour, Oravec said. High-wind warnings and advisories stretch from California to the Great Plains, and north and south “from border to border,” he said. Winds across the Plains have sparked red flag fire warnings from South Dakota to Texas.
“It’s an active pattern across the West,” Oravec said.
While the wet weather creates short-term hazards including mudslides and flooding, it also brings California desperately needed snow. The state gets most of its annual rain between October and April, and it depends on heavy mountain snows to keep water locked up in frozen reservoirs. Once it melts in spring and summer, that snow helps supply drinking water and irrigate crops.
But there is a downside to plentiful rain and snow during winter: It can fuel an abundance of wild vegetation, which raises fire risks later in the year as it dries out.
Los Angeles County Public Works has advised residents near the sites of recent fires to prepare for potential debris flows and mudslides. Endangered areas include the footprint for last January’s catastrophic blazes in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, as well as fires that scorched parts of Malibu and the Hollywood Hills.
Rock slides buried a section of iconic coastal Highway 1 outside Big Sur over the weekend, with reports of washouts and flooding in Santa Barbara and Monterey counties.
Meanwhile, state transportation officials recommended large trucks and campers stay off the road along busy Interstate 5 north of Los Angeles County Tuesday due to high winds.
Hours of heavy rainfall since the weekend triggered flash flood warnings and overwhelmed drainage systems in Southern California. Videos posted to social media showed self-driving Waymo cars pulled over in standing water on Los Angeles streets.
As storm drains continue to overflow, Los Angeles County public health officials advised beachgoers to stay out of the water until at least Saturday morning local time “due to potentially higher bacteria levels” from runoff and dirty floodwater.
After the current storms exit, another system could roll in next week, Oravec said. Since the beginning of the year, California has been quite dry.
“They need the rain and they are one of the few places in the country that aren’t in drought. This will keep them out of drought for a while,” Oravec said.
(Updates with avalanche rescue effort in fourth paragraph)
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