8 AM Thursday Storm Update - January 5, 2022

WEST COUNTY STORM UPDATE 1.5.23 8AM:

The most up-to-date County emergency resources can always be found at: SocoEmergency.org

Good morning, folks. It was a rough night of road closures, falling trees, power outages, and an unimaginably tragic fatality in Occidental. But we are starting Thursday morning off with some hopeful news. While some areas in the North Coast saw as much as a foot of rain — not to mention 80mph wind gusts — overall, rain totals for the first storm came in shy of predictions (and well short of worst case scenarios).

This means that as of this morning NOAA is *NOT* predicting the Russian River to reach flood stage from the first storm. The peak is expected to be a beautiful 25.4’ in Guerneville — beautiful because it’s nice see the river that full yet not impacting our homes and businesses.

NOAA *is* predicting the River to reach flood stage from the second storm. However, where previously they were predicting a 40’ peak, NOAA has now downgraded the potential peak to 36.1’ (good news for many local businesses and homes). The second storm event is expected to impact us starting Saturday, with Russian River water levels peaking in the wee hours of Monday morning (around 4AM).

While some homes and businesses will be impacted by a 36.1’ river height, this is a relatively minor flood, as floods go. But all eyes are on the third storm event (hitting Monday/Tuesday) — as well as a potential fourth storm event (potentially hitting Thursday/Friday) — to see how much precipitation they might bring to an already-flood-stage river. As usual, I’ll share info as it becomes available. The current long range (10 day probability) NOAA forecast is in this post showing the 3rd storm pushing us into the “roaring 40s” of flood stage.

If today you see an (exhausted) firefighter, Sheriff’s deputy, medic, CHP officer, PG&E worker, dispatcher, road crew worker, or Permit Sonoma inspector (yes they were out in the storm checking to make sure people had safe housing, and literally dodging falling trees) — I suggest gauging how well you know them and, based on that, giving them one of the following things:

1) Your thanks

2) Coffee

3) A hug

4) A 6-pack of beer

If you can send some thoughts and prayers to the family impacted in Occidental last night, that would be appreciated, too. ❤️ 

It was a long night… but it’s a brighter day. Stay safe, all! Hopefully PG&E will make progress on power restoration today — I know many, many towns in West County are still dark.