As the Bay Area braced itself Wednesday morning for a “bomb cyclone” approaching the region, parts of Northern California began enduring the worst of the storm.
By noon, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency over the extreme weather event while public safety workers across Sonoma County were ramping up their response to reports of downed power lines and trees. Outages affecting up to 17,000 residents were also reported in downtown San Jose.
This latest storm is an atmospheric river, essentially a giant conveyor belt of water in the sky and moisture-rich maelstrom rolling in from the Pacific Ocean to fill California’s reservoirs and blanket the Sierra Nevada