After all the hype, El Niño finally delivered this past weekend.
Paul Moreno, a spokesman for Pacific Gas and Electric Company, says 275,000 PG&E customers lost power at some point over the weekend.
Moreno said all customers should have had power restored by late Monday. Seventy-eight hundred households were still without power Monday afternoon.
“High winds slapping power lines together, breaking trees and tree branches that are falling into powerlines and even cars, skidding out of control and hitting our poles — those are the types of causes we’ve seen in the outages that have happened this stormy weekend,” Moreno said.
According to the National Weather Service, the storm dropped about three inches of rain in the valley, while mountain areas, particularly the Feather River basin, received as much as 10 inches of rain. The Sierra high country was buried under as much as five feet of new snow.
Extreme winds also battered the region. Meteorologist Eric Kurth with the weather service said gusts were clocked at 67 miles per hour in Chico and 76 miles per hour at Beale Air Force Base near Marysville.
Kurth said the region’s dry and mild February was no aberration. It’s not unusual for a weeks-long break from stormy weather. Conditions have recently changed.
“We had high pressure ridging which was deflecting storms to the north, and that’s since broken down and there’s really nothing now to stop the stream of very moist storms coming across the pacific,” he said.
Landslides Saturday night closed State Route 299 in Trinity County. Standing water remained on State Route 99 Monday morning. State Route 3 remains closed due to flooding over the Scott Mountain summit.
More storms are on the way. Kurth said that after a weak storm Tuesday night and a stronger one Thursday night, another deluge is in the offing.
“Looks like we could have maybe a very wet system like this past weekend’s, next weekend,” Kurth said.
