Wednesday's bomb cyclone turned out to be less impactful in terms of rainfall totals than the one we saw on Saturday, but forecasters were right about the wind-related dangers, and a downed tree has been blamed for at least one death in Sonoma County.
Tens of thousands of households and businesses remain without power on Thursday, including over 2,700 PG&E customers in San Francisco. The utility said that it had around 70,000 customers still experiencing an outage as of 6:45 p.m., per ABC 7 and the Mercury News, and the PG&E's outage map shows wide swaths of the Peninsula and Santa Clara County, as well as coastal Marin County, still without power. At one point Wednesday night, the count was 180,000 without power.
Just about everywhere you travel in west Sonoma County hills, trees are down everywhere, this one taking utility lines on Coleman Valley Rd. near Occidental. @NorthBayNews pic.twitter.com/hExR5b24tR
— Kent Porter (@kentphotos) January 5, 2023
As predicted, Wednesday's storm system led to countless downed trees and tree limbs. And one redwood tree that fell on a mobile home in Occidental, in Sonoma County, claimed the life of a two-year-old child, as the New York Times and others are reporting.
"When I first arrived on the scene a frantic father came out of the house holding a child, he was kind of covered in debris,” said Occidental Fire Chief Ron Lunardi, speaking to KRON4. “He said ‘my child’s not breathing.’"
Lunardi says he drove the father and child out to a main road where they met up with a rescue crew who began CPR, but the child could not be saved. Neither the father nor the mother were injured by the fallen tree.
A second death is benig attributed to storm, and it's that of a 19-year-old woman who crashed her car into a utility pole in Fairfield. As NBC Bay Area reports via Fairfield police, it appeared her car had hydroplaned likely while traveling at an unsafe speed for the conditions.
Minor and major flooding was reported across the Bay Area, and KTVU had an image of a car half-submerged last night in a flooded underpass in Oakland, as also seen below.
Car submerged under an overpass in Oakland, CA 📍⛈ Brace yourself for the next round of rain ⚠️
— BAY AREA STATE OF MIND (@YayAreaNews) January 5, 2023
Follow @YayAreaNews For Bay Area / Northern California Storm Updates In Real Time 🔔#BayArea #SanFrancisco #AtmosphericRiver #CAwx pic.twitter.com/wioQg9Farx
A Valero gas station in South San Francisco lost its canopy structure in the wind, and it came crashing down onto gas pumps.
Valero gas pumps destroyed in South San Francisco. #bayareawx @kron4news pic.twitter.com/v8t6SsIuPR
— Dan Thorn (@DanThorn_) January 5, 2023
And a giant eucalyptus tree crashed down onto an apartment building in East Oakland, as KTVU reports, displacing the five families that lived there.
A downed tree was blocking Highway 1 in Bodega Bay this morning in both directions, and as KRON4 reports, a mudslide also shut down Highway 1 between Stinson Bech and Muir Beach.
Photo: Sonoma County Sheriff/Facebook