Photo courtesy of Jason Averilla
A forceful storm drenched much of the Bay Area with three to eight inches of rain from early Sunday through Monday morning, causing areas of flooding and power outages for many residents and San Jose State students.
Communications senior Jason Averilla was driving to San Jose on Interstate 280 near Daly City around 5 p.m. Sunday when miles-long traffic was caught in several inches of rain flooding the highway.
“I was like, fuck, we got caught up in traffic, this is exactly what I didn’t want, you know? Who would like to be in traffic?” Averilla said in a phone call. “When we got closer and I saw, I was like, wow, what the hell? I thought it was an accident but it was like this huge ass ocean in the middle of the freeway.”
He said his car was stopped for about 30 minutes until traffic was able to start moving.
The 24-hour rain reached about an inch in San Jose, 4.3 inches in Oakland and more than 4.3 in San Francisco, according to Sunday’s preliminary National Weather Service data.
The storm, which is the strongest to hit the Bay Area in two years, is pushing southeast as of 3:45 p.m. Monday and is expected to swing through Southern California by nightfall, according to the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center.
Local meteorologists told the Mercury News in its Sunday article that the storm is part of a massive atmospheric system that includes moisture from rivers getting brought up from the tropics and a “bomb cyclone” hitting the Pacific Northwest with the power of a major hurricane.
Kenneth Mashinchi, SJSU senior director of strategic communications and media relations, said the university couldn’t respond in time of publication regarding the campus’s affected areas.
PG&E Emergency Operations Center and hundreds of crews are continuing to assess damages, make repairs and restore power in the major river storm, which was one of the most potent to hit Northern and Central California in more than a decade, according to the same news release.
“I can’t remember the last storm we had that was this bad,” Averilla said. “It was a scary day, we haven’t gotten this much rain in a while.”