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An intense storm swept through the Bay Area on Sunday, Feb. 4, bringing steady rain and gusting winds that left thousands in Palo Alto without power and created havoc and hazards on the roadways.
All throughout the day, residents in neighborhoods across the city lost their electricity one after the other as falling trees damaged power lines and forced shutoffs. City of Palo Alto Utilities Sunday night reported 13 outages had occurred, with five electrical fires and one report of wires down, according to the emergency-dispatch app PulsePoint.
City crews restored power to most of the utilities customers who’d spent part of the day in the dark, but about 500 customers went to bed in the pitch black Sunday, with restoration estimates pegged at past midnight.
With windspeeds reaching 50 mph at the Palo Alto Airport, the city’s trees were the day’s chief casualties.
Callum Budas and his friend Miguel Lopez were listening to music in Budas’ house on Sutherland Drive mid-afternoon Sunday when they noticed the wind picking up outside.
Then, Budas said, “We heard a huge crack.”
“Then we heard a thud,” Lopez added.
The Gunn High School seniors thought something had happened at a neighbor’s house — until they walked outside and saw a thick, 25-to-30 foot section of the Modesto ash in Budas’ front yard had split from the trunk and landed on the corner of the roof and the walkway.
Surprised, Budas said, “We burst out laughing.” Then they phoned his parents, who cut short their late lunch and hurried home.
A crew with Davey Tree, which is a city contractor, was called in to take care of the Budases’ fallen branch. One worker said that trees in Palo Alto like the Modesto ash are particularly vulnerable to snapping because, having been planted in the mid-20th century, they’re coming to the end of their lifespan.
Earlier in the day, a massive tree tumbled onto Oregon Expressway at Bryant Street. At 8:31 a.m., Palo Alto police said they’d closed the eastbound lanes of Oregon so that crews could clear the road. It re-opened at 9:55 a.m., police reported.
Then at 10:35 a.m., a downed electrical line temporarily shut down Embarcadero Road between Louis Road and Greer Road, Palo Alto police said. Embarcadero reopened at 11:08 a.m.
The outages also created public hazards along the roadways because signal lights were not working. Along Middlefield Road in the late afternoon, cars treated intersections as four-way stops. But at dusk, visibility decreased. In front of Cubberley Community Center, drivers who couldn’t see the blackened signals at Middlefield and Montrose Avenue sped through the intersection, oblivious to the crosswalks and cross traffic.
Caltrain was also affected by the storm when a large tree fell across the tracks about 200 feet south of the San Antonio station in Mountain View, the agency reported. Overhead wires were affected by the tree, which crashed down around 3:39 p.m. Caltrain had to stop trains from using the San Antonio station while workers removed the tree.
San Francisquito Creek, a source of constant concern in north Palo Alto, stayed within its banks Sunday, not rising to flood levels.
Rain is expected to continue Monday, with a chance of showers and thunderstorms, according to the National Weather Service. Some of the storms could produce heavy rain, but the forecast calls for winds gusting to only 18 mph.