SAN JOSE, Calif. — After a few days break from the downpour, another storm moved into the Bay Area on Saturday with wind gusts topping over 45 miles per hour in the morning. Those winds could topple trees, sending them tumbling into power lines.
“Even some gusts of 30 to 40 miles per hour have got the potential to cause trees to come down and some power issues,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Colby Goatley. “Roots can’t hold the tree up when everything around them is muddy.”
Some 16,000 households throughout the greater Bay Area were without power Saturday morning, with more than 1,319 customers affected in Santa Clara and 2,657 in Marin. It’s an improvement, though, over what has been a rough last week when at one point, more than 100,000 households were affected.
Although high winds are forecast to die down Saturday afternoon, 1 to 2 inches of new rain is expected at lower elevations. That’ll add considerably to the 8 to 10 inches of precipitation which has already accumulated in parts of the Bay Area over the last 19 days.
The anticipated rain is once again triggering flood warnings across the region. Four waterways are forecast to reach moderate flood stage on Saturday, including Alameda Creek near Niles, the San Lorenzo river near Felton, Pacheco Creek near Dunneville and Big Sur River near Big Sur. The forecasted flooding of the San Lorenzo river near Felton, which was expected to peak Saturday morning, has already triggered emergency evacuations in the Felton Grove neighborhood.
On Saturday, Joany Morgan gazed with despair at her blue-painted home, sitting in about a foot of muddy water across from Felton Covered Bridge Park. The San Lorenzo River had risen above flood stage, triggering evacuations for a third time.
“It looks awful,” Morgan said. “There’s so much stuff — our garbage cans keep coming and going, we’ve got so much debris and mud.”
Morgan had already evacuated her home on New Year’s Eve. Last Sunday, she was nervously monitoring the river gauges online, watching as the river again steadily began to rise.
“I must have fallen asleep,” Morgan said. “At 5 o’clock, I heard the bullhorn — GET OUT! We took the truck and got out.”
Soquel Creek, which runs through Soquel and Capitola, was also surging Saturday, climbing towards flood stage and triggering a third round of evacuations at nearby homes.
But not everyone plans to evacuate. San Jose firefighter recruit Roman Bodnarchuk, who has evacuated his second-story apartment next to Soquel Creek twice in the last two weeks, said he does not plan to pack his parents into his car and drive to a nearby hotel this time — even as more than a foot of water flowed into his backyard Saturday morning.
“It’s just expensive for the family of four, and we also have two dogs, just to be evacuated for a few hours,” Bodnarchuk said.
Bodnarchuk’s parents are Ukrainian refugees who moved into his apartment just four days before the first evacuation warnings were issued in his neighborhood on New Year’s Eve. In between evacuations, Bodnarchuk’s mother has been in and out of the hospital while battling a serious bacterial pneumonia infection and the flu. At some point when the floodwaters finally recede, Bodnarchuk plans on bringing his mother back to the hospital for a checkup.
“I’m not processing this whole thing, because I’m more in survival mode,” Bodnarchuk said. “I’ll probably start thinking about this when we have some sunny weather … because it’s just too much. It’s very overwhelming.”
And it’s not just floods that were causing concern throughout the Bay Area on Saturday.
State Route 84 is once again closed in both directions a few miles north of Fremont, after rain triggered a mudslide. The road had just reopened Thursday, after road crews removed debris which the previous storm pushed onto the roadway,
After the heavy rain dies down Saturday evening, light showers are forecast to continue through Sunday and most of Monday. Then drier weather is expected for most of next week, with some possibility of light rain on Wednesday.
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(Staff writer John Woolfolk contributed to this report.)
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