Storm conditions and heavy rain associated with an atmospheric river have continued into mid-week in Humboldt County, prompting flood warnings and road closures along important routes throughout the county. But a respite from the storm seems to be in our future.
The “atmospheric river impacting California will only gradually settle southward through the middle of the week as multiple waves of low pressure traverse the front and bring strong Pacific moisture transport into the coastal ranges, portions of the Central Valley, and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada …” the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center noted.
Throughout Monday and Tuesday morning, residents in Southern Humboldt and along the Eel River have been visited by dramatic scenes of rising water, but Matthew Kidwell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s office in Eureka, says that flooding had already reached its zenith by Tuesday morning, would persist into Wednesday and then more dramatically decline over the end of the week.
“Today, most of the rain is, fortunately, south of Humboldt County … we’ll get one more round of rain this afternoon with snow at higher elevations. And then the heavier rain will push out of here, and that will pretty much end the flooding threat,” Kidwell said.
Kidwell said that less severe showers and snow will continue into the week, with snow potentially making its way down to as low as 500 feet in areas like Fickle Hill. And he warned that hailstorms throughout the later half of the week could result in unsafe road conditions.
“When we get these cold systems, we … will get small hail showers. It might be around 40 degrees on Wednesday, and go from heavy rain to small hail, which is basically little balls of ice, and you can imagine, when those fall on the roadway when it’s just above freezing, they’re going to take a little while to melt, and that can be really dangerous for driving.
Drivers should exercise an abundance of caution on Wednesday and Thursday, Kidwell said, particularly while driving in rainy conditions.
“Everybody (should) be aware that there could be a slide anywhere around the corner,” Humboldt County Public Work Roads Division manager Steve Finch said. “When things get wet like this and saturated, trees fall. Slides happen. Roads slip out, and everybody needs to be aware and drive defensively.”
Finch told the Times-Standard that many of the challenges that his division has dealt with over the course of the storm are fairly routine in a winter storm, and said that Caltrans had been harder hit by the storm with closures along state Route 36 — closures that have necessitated some additional work along alternate routes on county roads.
“A bunch of the roads in Ferndale closed for a bit, but last I saw, water was going back down …” Finch said. “There really hasn’t been much new damage compared to what we had in the last storm. There’s a little more snow than we had last time. We had about two inches of snow up on Bald Hills with chains required; the roads are open, but it’s snowing now … Other than that, everything has been not-to-bad. I drove down through Hookton this morning, and that was actually open; it wasn’t flooded like it normally is.”
Finch added that many of the county roads that had been closed on Monday had already reopened, and he didn’t anticipate much in the way of enduring infrastructure damage. He noted that community members can report a problem at 707-445-7421 or through the Public Works division’s website.
“We’re going to have the potholes like we always do,” Finch said. “When we have a lot of rain, we get potholes, and we chase those down when we can.”
As of Tuesday at noon, Caltrans has reported a complete road closure persists on State Route 254 from Holmes Flat Road to Barkdull Road and from Lum Street in Weott to 0.5 miles north of Marin Garden Club Grove, with no time frame for reopening.
Additionally, Caltrans reports closures on SR 36 at several points west of Bridgeville Post Office due to rockslides.
Just before 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Caltrans fully closed SR 299 from Blue Lake Boulevard to west of Willow Creek due to snow.
Further south, Caltrans has reported partial closure of Highway 101 in Piercy (from “Piercy Separation 10-91 to South Fork Eel River Bridge”) as well as emergency closures along Highway 101/State Route 271 north and south of Leggett.
Limited power outages persisted throughout Tuesday in northern Fortuna and Blue Lake, with scattered reports of small-scale outages in Arcata and in southeastern parts of the county, but as a whole, Humboldt County’s power grid seemed remarkably resilient throughout this weekend’s storm.
“PG&E has definitely been preparing for this storm,” said Megan McFarland, a spokesperson for PG&E, who noted that the company employs a variety of tools and strategies to predict and combat storm-related outages.
McFarland said the company’s meteorology team has also developed a “storm outage prediction model” that uses artificial intelligence and “incorporates real-time weather forecasts, historical data and system knowledge” to locate potentially hard-hit areas and direct resources in advance of a potential outage or emergency.
“We have a full-time meteorology team, (and) one of the things we do is we start looking at our staffing model and where we have extra crews and resources that we can put on standby to move up to hard-hit areas after the weather clears to help with restoration,” said McFarland. “Another thing that we do with all our local yards in areas that are experiencing heavy storm impacts (is) we will stockpile a lot of the equipment that typically gets damaged by storms — things like poles, transformers and wire. We have all those things ready for when the weather clears up.”
Resources
Caltrans QuickMap: https://quickmap.dot.ca.gov
PG&E outage map: https://quickmap.dot.ca.gov/
Robert Schaulis can be reached at 707-441-0585.
