Winds from atmospheric river storm knock out power to thousands of Bay Area PG&E customers
Strong winds and rain from the atmospheric river storm hitting the Bay Area caused thousands of PG&E customers to lose power on Wednesday, the utility said.
The largest outages were reported in Santa Clara County. The city of Mountain View reported more than 10,000 customers without power just before 4 p.m. on Thursday. That number had been reduced by about half by 5 p.m.
Most Mountain View customers had their power restored by 10 p.m., with PG&E still reporting about 1,500 customers without power in the city at that time, most near the Sunnyvale city limits. A separate pair of outages in Sunnyvale left another 2,000 without power as of 10 p.m.
Other scattered outages were reported near Cupertino and Campbell. A PG&E representative did not return a request for peak outage numbers late Wednesday.
San Francisco and Daly City saw over 10,000 customers lose power in the area around Lake Merced and San Francisco's Ingleside District. The city of Rio Vista in Solano County had about 4,200 customers without power as of 10 p.m., according to PG&E's outage map.
An outage in the Sebastopol area also left more than 4,000 customers without power late in the afternoon from storm-related causes. That outage was resolved within a few hours.
Wind gusts at San Jose Mineta International Airport reached 45 mph on Wednesday, and about a quarter inch of rain was recorded, according to the National Weather Service.
At Santa Rosa's Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport, four-tenths of an inch of rain was recorded, as of 5 p.m., with the highest wind gust measuring 39 mph.
High winds and more rain are forecast overnight and throughout Thursday.
