Bay Area residents awake in the dark; Widespread outages, Mt. Diablo District schools closed

BURLINGAME -- Damaging winds, whipped up by a potent Cat. 3 atmospheric river, toppled trees and ripped down power lines across the San Francisco Bay Area, triggering massive outages that left neighborhoods still in the dark early Wednesday.

According to Pacific Gas and Electric, there were nearly 100,000 customers in the Bay Area without power as of 5:15 p.m. That was down from the 300,000 during the height of the storm on Tuesday.

The bulk of the outages remain in the South Bay where 60,260 customers were without electricity. On the Peninsula, 23,822 customers were still in the dark.

The East Bay had an additional 13,906 households. Both the North Bay (802 customers) and San Francisco (116 customers) were seeing far less impact.

Along the hardest hit communities was Los Altos.

"Most of Los Altos remains without power at this time," officials said in an email warning. "PG&E is working to restore power as quickly as possible. While no exact time has been given to have power fully restored to the area, PG&E is estimating Thursday, March 16 at 10 PM to have power back on."  

Meanwhile, an outage in the East Bay forced 16 schools to be closed for the day in the Mt. Diablo School District.

The schools were:

• Bancroft Elementary
• Cambridge Elementary
• Fair Oaks Elementary
• Gregory Gardens Elementary
• Highlands Elementary
• Oak Grove Middle School
• Olympic High School
• Preschool Assessment Center
• Pine Hollow Middle School
• Pleasant Hill Middle School
• Robert Shearer Preschool
• Valle Verde Elementary
• Walnut Acres Elementary
• Westwood Elementary
• Woodside Elementary
• Ygnacio Valley High School  

"In order to maintain a safe facility for our students, we have made the difficult decision to close only the affected schools listed below for today, Wednesday, March 15," district officials said. "However, staff should report to your sites to assist with supervision of students who may not have received the District's notification to parents this morning, and then work with principals on work location arrangements for the day, once students are accounted for safely." 

Also Read:  List of other Bay Area School Closures

A National Weather Service high wind warning was in effect through 11 p.m. Tuesday. 

"Strongest gusts so far have been in the higher terrain: 93 mph along the Bolinas Ridge, 88 mph in the hills above Los Gatos," said KPIX meteorologist Paul Heggen on Tuesday evening. "Closer to sea level, most gusts have been in the 50-60mph range, although SFO did record a 74 mph gust this afternoon."  

There were also gusts of 97 mph at  Mount Umunhum in the Santa Cruz Mountains, 93 mph along Mines Road in the East Bay; and 71 mph in the Las Trampas and Oakland hills.

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The streets of tree-lined Palo Alto took on a scary feel as the winds whipped through the city.

"The winds were super strong, they were bending the trees in my own yard and sure enough my power goes out and I come out to investigate and I see this big tree lying down here," David Hesting told KPIX.

The century-old oak toppled onto a house on and parked car on Middlefield Road. No one was in the car, but two people were inside the house.  

"It definitely had them trapped where they couldn't get out the front door," said Shane Yarborough of the Palo Alto Fire Dept. "We had to rescue them out the back, but there were no injuries to the residents that lived there."

Multiple trees fell in the neighborhoods around Embarcadero Road, closing down the main artery just before the afternoon rush.

 Several parked and empty cars were crushed including a Tesla that was clobbered by a 100-foot evergreen.

There was an electrical fire on El Camino Real and Rosedale Avenue involving downed power lines that burned a newly installed residential fence and melted the asphalt. 

"You could hear the electricity actually sparking, and shocks were kind of flying everywhere," said Christina Yermanov. "At one time the electrical cord was hissing and making kind of like an 's' in the air." 

Yermanov said she heard the commotion from inside her home. 

"It was pretty scary," she said. "We have a big power line right behind our house and so we thought we were going to have to be evacuated I had a little bag packed of all of our stuff just in case."