SONOMA, Calif. (AP) - Sodden hillsides crumbled onto roadways, fears of flooding closed scores of schools, and torrents washed away more of the rain-weakened spillway of the state’s second-largest reservoir as Northern California struggled Thursday amid one of its wettest winters in decades.
In hard-hit coastal mountains near Santa Cruz, a dump truck accidentally ran over two highway workers -killing one - as the men worked to clear one of several slides of mud and rock pouring on to Highway 17, the California Highway Patrol said.
In Central California, a car plunged into a flooded creek near Bakersfield. Kern County authorities rescued a woman who was clinging to tree branches in the swollen creek but a man in his 20s died when the car submerged upside down.
Thursday’s storm whipped the Golden Gate Bridge with wind gusts near 60 mph and brought nearly an inch of rain to parts of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Northern California already has received more than a year’s worth of rain and snow from an unending series of storms, with two months left to go in the winter rainy season.
“The ground is already super-saturated,” National Weather Service forecaster Steve Anderson said. “The water is still flowing out of the hills from the storm on Tuesday.”
The weather service said Thursday the central and northern Sierra Nevada was on track to tie or pass 1982-83, the previous recent wettest year for those areas. The southern Sierra was on track to tie the previous wettest year of 1968-69.
To the west, the Sonoma County hamlet of Venado was measuring rainfall not in inches, or in feet, but in yards - three of them since the rainy season started in October, the weather service said.
Residents along Sonoma County’s Russian River stacked up sandbags and retreated to the second floor of buildings.
Lynn Crescione, owner of Creekside Inn & Resort in Guerneville, said many long since had raised their buildings on stilts for days like Thursday.
“We’ve been here 35 years, and we’ve risen most of our buildings over time. When it rains we just go upstairs,” Crescione said.
Around Northern California, state workers opened flood gates to release some of the water building up in reservoirs and rivers. State engineers discovered new damage to the spillway of Lake Oroville’s dam, the tallest in the United States, but said there was no immediate danger to the dam itself or to the public.
On Wednesday, chunks of concrete went flying from the water surging down the spillway, creating a 200-foot-long, 30-foot-deep hole that grew Thursday.
Engineers don’t know what caused what state Department of Water Resources spokesman Eric See called a “massive” cave-in that is expected to keep growing until it reaches bedrock.
With little choice, the department on Thursday again ramped up the outflow from Lake Oroville over the damaged spillway to try to keep up with the torrential rainfall flowing into the reservoir from the Sierra foothills
The weather service said the storms were part of a “classic pineapple express,” an atmospheric river phenomenon that carries moisture across the Pacific Ocean from Hawaii and dumps it on Northern California.
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