Highway 1, the main route between Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, remained closed for a second day Monday, its lanes submerged under an enormous expanse of muddy floodwaters that covered neighboring farm fields, homes and businesses after a levee on the Pajaro River failed.
As another atmospheric river roars in from the Pacific, set to hit the Bay Area early Tuesday morning, Caltrans officials said they have no estimate on when the critical road — traveled by tens of thousands of motorists a day — will reopen.
“It’s an extended closure,” said Kevin Drabinski, a Caltrans spokesman. “It’s all a factor of when the water recedes.”
The water was not likely to recede any time soon.
Forecasters said the latest storm was expected to bring strong winds, falling trees, power outages, shallow landslides in some areas and widespread rain to the Bay Area and Monterey Bay Area overnight, peaking at about 5 a.m. Tuesday with rain expected all day.
“Unfortunately the last storm system put our soils in very saturated conditions,” said Brayden Murdock, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “The flooding conditions we had are probably going to be enhanced. Any rain we see is not going to soak in. The river systems and road systems are going to get that water.”
This is Salinas Road at Werner Road heading into Pajaro.
For the latest road closures, evacuation warnings and orders, and other weather news stay with us: https://t.co/BaJ8PuWnAIPhoto Courtesy of CHP Monterey pic.twitter.com/g9KTuWhixQ
— KION News Channel 46 (@KION546) March 13, 2023
About 1 to 2 inches of rain is expected in cities around the Bay Area through Tuesday night, with 3 to 4 inches in the North Bay Hills and 4 to 6 inches in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
During the last atmospheric river storm that landed Thursday night into Friday morning, major rivers around the Bay Area rose near flood stage, with a few, like the San Lorenzo River in Felton, overtopping slightly. Their levels dropped again over the weekend, and no major rivers, such as the Russian in Sonoma County or the Guadalupe through downtown San Jose, were forecast to flood Tuesday. But Murdock said small stream flooding and highway flooding is likely.
Officials also were keeping a close eye on the Carmel River and the Salinas River, where the Monterey County Sheriff ordered evacuations in communities between Castroville and King City in the Salinas Valley.
The National Weather Service issued a flash flood watch through Wednesday morning for most of Northern California. It also issued a high wind warning through late Tuesday night, with gusts up to 40 mph expected across the Bay Area, and winds as high as 70 mph in the hills.
With Highway 1 closed for 12 miles between Watsonville and Castroville in both directions, motorists were being sent on a 33-mile detour along highways 129, 101 and 156.
The latest meteorological assault was likely to make recovery from the levee break more difficult. Crews worked Monday to fill in a 300-foot section of earthen levee that burst on the south side of the Pajaro River about 3 miles north of the city of Watsonville, causing flooding early Saturday morning.
Another storm means more water in the already flooded community of Pajaro, a town of about 3,000 people, many of them low-income farm workers employed by strawberry farms that are now underwater. Several hundred people who evacuated from waist-deep water in Pajaro’s streets remained at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds in Watsonville Monday, receiving aid from the Red Cross and other organizations.
“This is going to add stress to a very stressful situation,” Murdock said. It’s a lot of rain over not a whole lot of time.”
The storm was expected to pass by Wednesday, with clear weather forecast for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
Apart from windy, wet conditions in the Bay Area and Central Coast, the atmospheric river also was expected to bring several feet of new snow to the Sierras, where this winter already has been one for the history books, smashing drought conditions that have plagued the state for the past three years.
On Monday, the statewide Sierra snowpack was 215% of normal. Put another way, the Sierra, which provides nearly one-third of California’s water, has so far received two years’ worth of snow this winter, with more on the way.
“I have been here for 26 years. I’ve never seen a winter like this,” said Cristi Creegan, the mayor of South Lake Tahoe.
On Saturday, the Raley’s supermarket near Heavenly ski area in South Lake Tahoe closed after a portion of the roof caved in due to the weight of snow.
“People are definitely on edge,” Creegan said. “We have several roof collapses. Building inspectors are checking all over town.”
Neighbors have been digging out fire hydrants around the area after firefighters responded to a house fire in South Lake Tahoe recently and had to spend 20 minutes digging through snow before they could get to the hydrant, she added.
Creegan said, however, that in recent days, the weather had started to feel more-spring-like, despite all the snow.
“I heard a red-winged blackbird yesterday,” she said. “We’re a resilient community. We’ve been through big winters before. We see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
A look at the timeline of our atmospheric river pic.twitter.com/tCRJGIJxJW
— Drew Tuma (@DrewTumaABC7) March 13, 2023
The heavy rain and snowfall — the biggest in 30 years in the Sierra, and the largest in recorded history in the Southern Sierra — comes on the heels of multiple drought years, and severe wildfire years in California.
A new study published Monday by scientists at NASA found that droughts and flooding over the past decade have been more frequent around the world than in the prior decade. The researchers, who tracked the trends with satellites, said that climate change is making droughts more severe, and wet years, when warmer temperatures carry more moisture in large storms, also more pronounced.
“The idea of climate change can be abstract,” said Matt Rodell, study co-author and a hydrologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “A couple of degrees warmer doesn’t sound like much, but water cycle impacts are tangible. Global warming is going to cause more intense droughts and wet periods, which affects people, the economy, and agriculture around the world.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com