Sacramento cleans up after California storm’s winds pull down trees and cut power

An extreme atmospheric river storm that reached Northern California on Tuesday evening brought extreme wind gusts overnight and is continuing to wreak havoc Wednesday morning in the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada.

Here’s the latest on the storm and its effects on Sacramento and Northern California:

Sacramento begins cleaning up

Fierce, howling southerly winds knocked out power for tens of thousands in the valley, many of whom remain without power. The gusts toppled trees, and the mix of high winds with a half-inch and an inch of rain near the capital contributed to numerous traffic incidents on Sacramento-area highways. Downed power lines and trees also forced extended roadway closures, many of them overnight.

Sacramento’s Land Park neighborhood, largely blacked out since about 10 p.m., was a sea of fallen tree limbs and overturned trash barrels early Wednesday. A clump of fallen branches blocked West Land Park Drive, while city crews were beginning to sweep up limbs that had fallen throughout the park itself. Further south, on Fruitridge Ridge, city workers were feeding branches and limbs into a wood chipper near Belle Cooledge Library as commuters sped by.

Around midnight near 13th and D streets in the Mansion Flats section of Sacramento, a “thump” woke up Irving Noriega, 19, and his family. His parents ran out to see a tree had fallen straight into a neighbor’s home, cleaving a gaping hole into the side of the house.

“We heard a huge thump on the ground,” Noriega said. “It broke our neighbor’s house literally in half.”

They called the police immediately, unsure whether the tree had fallen into their neighbor’s bedroom. Police later told them no one was inside the house.

After smashing through the roof, the limb was protruding from the other side of the home, exposing asbestos insulation and wood splinters. A steady stream of neighbors came by Wednesday to gawk and snap photos.

The home was cordoned off with yellow police tape. Long branches from the downed tree mostly spared Noriega’s family home, save for their fence, some railing and a small leak.

“It’s really scary, in the middle of the night and you just hear a huge tree fall,” Noriega said. “It was nerve-wracking too, we were just shaking like, ‘That just happened.’ It’s never happened before.”

Nekhbir Bhandal has owned the Bombay Bar & Grill on 21st Street in midtown for the past 10 years.

Overnight, large tree limbs crushed the outdoor patio to his restaurant. The tree limbs also knocked down two utility poles, which were blocking 21st between Capitol Avenue and N Street Wednesday afternoon.

Sacramento police patrol cars were parked on 21st Street, blocking traffic in both directions and officers were directing traffic away from the area.

“(The tree limbs) made a lot of damage, the patio is all broken down,” he said. “I think we’ll need a whole new patio.”

Bhandal said a repair company visited his restaurant Wednesday to examine the damage, but the restaurant owner said he hasn’t received an estimate on the costs to repair the patio or when that work can be done.

The restaurant, which serves Indian cuisine, also has no power. Bhandal said he doesn’t know when the power will be restored.

Once that happens, he can reopen the restaurant for takeout only. The outdoor patio was the only way the Bombay Bar & Grill can offer dining under the state guidelines to prevent further spread of COVID-19. Bhandal guessed his restaurant might be open for takeout in a few days. He said outdoor dining might not be available for another 10 to 15 days.

More rain expected overnight in Sacramento-area

The latest round in this week’s damaging winter storm was dropping rain Wednesday afternoon in Merced, Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties. pushing north toward the Sacramento-area, said Scott Rowe, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. He said shortly before 3 p.m. Wednesday that residents in the region should expect to see more rainfall within the next hour or so.

About 1 to 2 inches of additional rainfall was expected in the Sacramento-area through Thursday evening. Rowe said wind gusts peaked about 60 to 70 mph late Tuesday and early Wednesday, but he expected the wind speed to “significantly” reduce Wednesday evening with peaks wind gusts expected to reach about 30 mph. That will drop to wind gusts of about 10 to 15 mph by Thursday evening.

“The most dangerous aspects of this wind impact have come and gone,” Rowe said.

The temperature in the Sacramento-area is expected to drop to 47 degrees overnight, with the high temperature expected to reach 53 degrees Thursday and 54 degrees Friday, according to the weather service.

A long and scary night in Carmichael

Kathye Miller was awake in her rented home on Carmelo Drive at 2:30 a.m. listening to the wind howl through the neighborhood when she suddenly heard a loud, violent sound coming from the redwood tree outside her bedroom window.

“I heard a crack, it broke off the tree and that (branch) came down four feet from my head,” Miller said Wednesday morning as she stood in her Carmichael front yard and watched a crew begin the task of cutting up the huge branch. “I was awake. I heard the wind, the wind was really obnoxious, and that big tree about two feet in diameter missed me by four feet.

“It came into my living room. It did not come into my bedroom, thank you, God.”

Miller said she was home with her dog and two cats at the time, and that no one was injured. The tree fell just 15 minutes before the neighborhood was plunged into complete darkness by a power outage that lasted until 6 a.m.

The tree branch smashed into the shake roof over the living room, and tree service workers told her they were concerned that it was still too windy Wednesday to cut down the remainder of the redwood tree still standing.

Now, she has to find a place to live and store her belongings while repairs are made. But Miller said she wasn’t complaining after her close call.

“I’m blessed,” she said.

Miller’s home appeared to have suffered the worst damage in the neighborhood, where fences were blown down and trees and branches littered the residential streets.

At Rio Americano High School, a redwood was snapped off at its base from the wind, and tree branches littered the campus.

All along American River Drive felled trees blocked portions of the road, and at Ancil Hoffman Golf Course, which was populated Wednesday morning only by dog walkers and a lone coyote, two large trees snapped in half near the second tee.

Across the county in Elk Grove, public works crews were busy Wednesday clearing away fallen trees and limbs and keeping an eye on localized flooding.

City crews fielded close to 100 storm-related calls by 11 a.m., most of them related to toppled trees, and expected to be at it for the next several days, said Elk Grove city spokeswoman Kristyn Lawrence.

“Cleanup may take several days due to the number of incidents. Our crews are preparing for the next round set to hit tonight bringing more rain but with milder winds,” Lawrence said via email.

Lawrence said local creeks are running below monitoring levels and even with the anticipated 1 to 2 inches of rain expected tonight and into Thursday, “the city is not expecting issues with this additional precipitation.”

Over an inch of rain has fallen in Sacramento

While the storm brought only an inch or so of rain across the Sacramento region overnight, forecasters said showers were expected throughout the day with up to three-quarters of an inch possible in the evening.

Precipitation will continue through at least Thursday near the capital, but winds will be much calmer by that evening, as slow as 5 mph, NWS forecasts show.

“It’s not gonna be a washout all day, but there will be periods of moderate to heavy rain intermittently” Thursday in Sacramento, Rowe said. “Definitely a good idea to keep that umbrella nearby and ready.”

Rowe defined an atmospheric river as “essentially just a concentrated ribbon of moisture that takes aim at California.”

“Right now that atmospheric river is centered just south of (Sacramento),” but there is a chance it could shift north Wednesday or Thursday, he said, which is why severe weather warnings including flash flood watches remain in place.

Latest doppler radar loop for Northern California

Source: National Weather Service

Power out for tens of thousands of PG&E, SMUD customers

Pacific Gas and Electric reported at 6 a.m. that more than 175,000 customers across 31 counties remain without power due to weather events.

More than 23,000 Yolo County residents are still without power Wednesday afternoon as the Sacramento region prepares for another weather system to move in.

Woodland appeared to bear the brunt of the wind-whipped storm where more than 9,300 customers still without power at noon, according to Pacific Gas & Electric outage information.

Davis was also hard hit. PG&E officials said 8,875 customers were waiting for service to return while another 4,800 West Sacramento customers were waiting early Wednesday afternoon for power to be restored. In Winters, 257 customers were without power, according to the utility.

Nearly 10,000 of PG&E customers in Davis’ western neighborhoods to Highway 113 were waiting for the lights to come back on at 2 p.m.

Nearly 9,400 Woodlanders have spent the day without electricity as PG&E crews work to restore power to neighborhoods across the city.

In West Sacramento, “we’ve got the whole Bryte/Broderick area without power,” city spokesman Paul Hosley said Wednesday afternoon. The neighborhoods account for nearly all of the city’s 4,800 outages. Other isolated outages are scattered across the city. Officials are waiting for word from Pacific Gas & Electric on when power will be restored.

Crews are also clearing downed trees citywide, Hosley said.

”We have a lot of downed trees throughout the city. We’ve had minor blockages of trees and roads, some storm damage issues. We’ve had several reports of trees going onto homes and cars,” he said, but no injuries have been reported.

More than 50,000 of the PG&E outages are in San Joaquin County, where the Sheriff’s Office tweeted that it has been experiencing intermittent issues with its 911 system.

Sacramento Municipal Utility District at 5:30 a.m. said it had about 106,000 customers impacted by outages, down from a peak of close to 150,000 around 2:30 a.m. By 1:30 p.m., 60,000 customers were still in the dark.

SMUD spokesman Chris Capra said the utility’s crews restored power to about 80,000 customers between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m., but that still left another 80,000 homes and business in the dark.

Capra said he couldn’t provide an estimate as to when those customers would get their electricity back.

Most of the outages were caused by tree branches and other objects pulling down lines in the storm. Others were cascading effects of outages, such as blown transformers.

The storm initially cut power to a sizable chunk of SMUD’s territory, blacking out a quarter of the utility’s customer base. “We’ve made significant headway already,” Capra said.

But he said the dangerous winds caused delays in getting power restored; as a rule, the utility has to get crews out of cherry pickers once the winds exceed 25 mph.

“We can’t have ‘em up in buckets, up in lines,” Capra said. “As the winds die down, we can get crews out and address the issues of poles down.”

He said top priority is fixing live, fallen power lines, which can create major safety problems; the second priority is tackling areas where “big swaths of customers” are without power. “Then, later on, we get into what we call the onesies and twosies,” he said.

Winds gusts top 65 mph at airports; 125 mph at Alpine summit

The National Weather Service reported Wednesday morning that gusts peaked well above 60 mph in the Sacramento area within the past 24 hours: 67 mph at McClellan Airport and 63 mph at Sacramento International Airport.

“This was stronger than the threshold that we would issue severe thunderstorm warnings for” in the Sacramento Valley, NWS meteorologist Scott Rowe said.

The NWS Sacramento office tweeted around 5 a.m. that the “strongest winds are over” and that gusts will gradually decrease. Shortly after 7:30 a.m., Rowe said gusts near Sacramento were around 28 mph.

“A far cry from what we saw in the overnight hours,” he said.

Near Tahoe, a peak gust of 125 mph was observed at Alpine Meadows, according to the NWS.

Blizzard conditions will persist in Sierra

A blizzard warning is in effect for a long strip of the central and southern Sierra range through 2 a.m. Friday, with the NWS saying 5 to 8 feet of snow could fall in some areas, and that gusts could exceed 70 mph along ridgetops.

Rowe said the blizzard warning stretches from Plumas County down to, but not including, Yosemite National Park.

“We are experiencing near-whiteout conditions with those strong winds and falling snow,” Rowe said.

Mountain travel is strongly discouraged.

Snow fell at very low elevations Tuesday in the foothills and northern Sacramento Valley, including a significant amount in Redding and some in Red Bluff. Snow reached 1,500 feet in Sonoma County while residents in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento saw rain turn to snow at 2,000 feet in places such as Applegate around 10 p.m.

Latest visible satellite loop for West Coast

Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Freeway closures, light rail outages

There are traffic delays on many Sacramento-area freeways.

Around 9:15 a.m., Caltrans said two of the four lanes on westbound Interstate 80 are closed at Longview Drive due to roadway flooding. Both lanes reopened within about 20 minutes.

Caltrans at 4:30 a.m. reported that Interstate 5 was closed in both directions just west of Sacramento International Airport due to a big rig overturned on the bypass and “partially hanging over the side,” Caltrans District 3 tweeted.

The California Highway Patrol’s online activity log shows no injuries were reported in that big rig incident. Northbound I-5 reopened around 6:15 a.m. while southbound lanes remain closed.

Highway 99 was closed for hours overnight in both directions near Elverta Road due to downed power lines across the roadway. It reopened around 6:30 a.m.

A downed tree caused a three-vehicle crash on Highway 70 near Magnolia Road, Caltrans also reported in the early morning hours. That incident has been cleared.

Light rail service is also down across Sacramento, with no lines operating. Regional Transit tweeted just after 6 a.m. that “all light rail lines” have been seriously impacted, and a bus bridge has been put in place throughout the system.

SacRT said wind damaged 75 light rail crossing gates; by around 9:45 a.m. 60 of those gates have been fixed and 15 still need repairs.

“Once power is restored across the system, we can begin bringing trains back onto the system.”

Broad chain controls remain in effect through the mountains on I-80 and Highway 50.

Caltrans officials said throughout the night that motorists should put off travel. The latest conditions can be found on Caltrans’ QuickMap App and website.

More snow heading for North State, I-5 closed in some areas

NWS forecasts show snow continuing at low elevations Wednesday morning. A few more inches could fall in Redding and Red Bluff, before snow levels rise to elevations above 3,000 feet in the afternoon.

Interstate 5 was closed in two places due to the snow: northbound traffic is being halted about 10 miles north of Redding, and southbound traffic is stopped at the Highway 3 junction in Yreka, according to Caltrans.

Additionally, chains are required along various stretches of I-5 in Shasta and Siskiyou counties, Caltrans says.

School closures

Several districts in the Sierra foothills were closed Wednesday due to the weather, including Camino Union and Pollock Pines Elementary schools.

El Dorado Union High, Latrobe Elementary and Pioneer Elementary school districts are on a delayed start.

Several other districts, including Tahoe Truckee Unified, opted for virtual learning.

In suburbs east of Sacramento, San Juan Unified School District canceled synchronous learning for all students. Officials told parents by telephone and email that asynchronous learning would continue for those with power and internet.

Students of Sacramento City Unified School District were encouraged to log on to distance learning if they could.

Flash flood watch issued near wildfire scar

The NWS issued a flash flood watch in place through Tuesday afternoon in the area of Northern California wildfire burn scars.

In particular, forecasters are concerned that heavy rainfall could “lead to flash flooding and debris flows” at the LNU Lightning Complex burn scar in parts of Yolo and Solano counties.

“Residents near the Hennessey Fire in the LNU Lightning Complex Burn Scar should prepare for potential flooding impacts,” the NWS said in its flash flood watch message issued at 1 a.m.

The Solano County Office of Emergency Services put an evacuation warning in place from Tuesday afternoon through 5 p.m. Thursday for a portion of the burn scar, with a map available on the county OES website. As of 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, the warning had not been upgraded to an order.

Further south in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties, officials lifted warnings for the burn areas from the CZU Complex as the storm pushed on shore without much rain.

“The heavy rain has ended,” the weather service said in an early morning bulletin. “Flooding is no longer expected to pose a threat.”

The Bee’s Daniel Kim, Rosalio Ahumada and Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks contributed to this story.