A gusty storm drawing torrents of moisture from the Pacific Ocean parked itself on Friday over the San Francisco Bay Area, flooding highways and toppling power lines. Officials warned the region’s nearly eight million residents to be ready for possible floods, landslides and widespread outages.
Heavy winds forced about 450 flight delays or cancellations before noon at San Francisco International Airport, according to FlightAware, a tracking website. Elsewhere in Northern California, rivers and creeks spilled over their banks after back-to-back days of pelting rain. Roads and fields flooded.
The dangerous weather, fed by an atmospheric river from the Pacific, started Tuesday in the Pacific Northwest, killing at least two people in the Seattle area and dumping heavy snow in the mountains. Falling trees triggered widespread power outages, and more than 165,000 customers in Washington State remained without electricity on Friday.
Utility officials said the outages could last through the weekend. The ongoing wind and rain have made it difficult for crews to complete repairs.
The heaviest wind and rain have pounded a region north of San Francisco that includes Napa wine country. Santa Rosa, the North Bay area’s largest city, is expected on Friday to break its record for three consecutive days of rainfall, said Brayden Murdock, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
The three-day total could be around 13 inches, far surpassing the current record of nine inches set during an atmospheric river storm in 2021. A few other spots at higher elevations in the North Bay have received even more precipitation, as much as 20 inches, he said.
“This is actually one of the wettest portions of the Bay Area, so the fact that this is high-end for that area really shows that this is pretty unprecedented territory,” Mr. Murdock said.
The Russian River, which flows through the Napa and Sonoma wine regions, neared flood stage on Friday, and forecasters warned it would most likely continue to swell over the next day.
Though rainfall slowed somewhat in the North Bay on Friday, as the storm inched south, flooding is most likely to continue into Saturday. Water that collected in mountain streams will continue to flow into the river, Mr. Murdock said.
The storm is expected to continue moving south on Friday to Monterey Bay, and later to California’s Central Coast and even to the Los Angeles region. The storm will most likely bring less than an inch of rain to Los Angeles over the weekend.
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