Powerful storm pummels West Coast
SAN FRANCISCO – A powerful storm churned down the West Coast on Thursday, bringing strong gales and much-needed rain and snow that caused widespread blackouts in Northern California and whiteouts in the Sierra Nevada.
The brunt of the storm hit the San Francisco Bay Area, flooding freeways, toppling trees and keeping thousands of people home from work and school.
“It’s a big storm, as we expected, and it’s headed south with very powerful winds and heavy rainfall,” National Weather Service meteorologist Will Pi said.
In Oregon, strong winds felled a tree, killing a homeless man who was sleeping on a trail, and a teenage boy died after a large tree fell on the vehicle in which he was riding, causing it to swerve and hit another tree.
Powerful gusts in Portland broke windows in a downtown building and likely caused the collapse of part of an exterior wall of an apartment building.
By Thursday evening, nearly 50,000 people had lost power in the greater Portland area.
From southwest Washington north to Tacoma, utilities reported more than 75,000 customers without power by Thursday evening.
The National Weather Service clocked a wind gust of 77 mph at Naselle in southwest Washington and another at 56 mph at Hoquiam on the coast.
In Kelso, Washington, a 61-year-old man was taken to a hospital after a tree broke through the rafters of his house and hit him in his garage. The Daily News of Longview said the man’s condition was not known.
Forecasters said this could be the biggest windstorm since one in 2006 knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of utility customers in Western Washington, some for more than a week.
In Northern California, a huge gust blew down an 80-foot fir at a Santa Cruz elementary school, pinning a sixth-grader by the arm for 15 minutes until chain saws cut him free.
“Unexpected, very unexpected,” said the head of Gateway Elementary, Zachary Roberts, who closed the school as the boy was treated and released from a hospital.
This “Pineapple Express” storm carried warm air and vast amounts of water in a powerful current stretching from Hawaii to the mainland and up into the mountains, where gusts up to 140 mph blew through passes, damaging homes in the Lake Tahoe area.
The current left San Francisco drenched but balmy, with 60-degree temperatures, about 5 degrees above average for this time of year.
Waves slammed onto waterfronts around the Bay Area, ferries were bound to their docks, airplanes were grounded and many schools and businesses told people to stay home.
The gusts made motorists tightly grip their steering wheels on the Golden Gate Bridge, where managers created a buffer zone to prevent head-on collisions by swerving cars.
The iconic suspension bridge is engineered to swing in cross winds, so “the concern we have right now is more about vehicles,” spokeswoman Priya David Clemens said.
Sonoma County authorities recommended that hundreds of people evacuate at least 300 homes in the lowest lying areas near the Russian River, which was expected to start overflowing overnight. Peak flooding in the towns of Guerneville and Monte Rio was anticipated by 10 a.m. today, forecasters said.
Pacific Gas & Electric Co. crews worked to restore power to 110,000 people, down from 166,000 earlier Thursday, with the largest concentration of 7,400 customers in San Francisco, the utility said. The utility’s online map showed lights out over thousands of square miles, from Humboldt near the Oregon border to Big Sur on the Central Coast.