Tornado alley it’s not, but a section of California was hit Saturday with a rare tornado that has been blamed for injuring five and flipping vehicles as a storm moved across the state.
A tornado in Scotts Valley, a small city about 6 miles north of Santa Cruz “threw multiple cars off the road,” the city police department said on Facebook, where it posted images of overturned vehicles.
Police Capt. Scott Garner said five people, most in vehicles that were tossed or moved by the tornado, suffered injuries, but none of them were major. Three were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries while two refused treatment at the scene, he said.
Photos shared by the Scotts Valley Police Department showed cars strewn about on and around Mount Hermon Road, the city’s main street and retail district, where the tornado touched down in the afternoon.
Officers responding to the scene were called to reports of a multi-vehicle collision, but were astonished to see instead the aftermath of a tornado, including bent utility poles and extensive property damage, Garner said.
“You can imagine officers responding finding telephone poles at angles,” he said. “They stumbled into that.”
The National Weather Service issued a local storm report that confirmed a touchdown in Scotts Valley at 1:40 p.m. It does not estimate the tornado’s strength, a task completed in person when it’s safe to do so.
California averages only about 11 tornadoes each year, with the northern Central Valley being the part of the state most likely to see one, according to the weather service.
Earlier Saturday, the weather service had issued a tornado warning for San Francisco shortly before 6 a.m., but it was canceled after no tornado organized in the area.
The warning was the first for San Francisco city and county at least since the inception of reliable weather records in 1950, said Nicole Sarment, a weather service meteorologist in the Bay Area.
In Scotts Valley, the area of Mount Hermon Road was expected to remain closed at least through Sunday morning as authorities assess damage and Pacific Gas & Electric repairs infrastructure and restores electricity, police said in a series of statements on Facebook.
On Saturday evening, more than 8,800 utility customers in Santa Cruz County were in the dark, according to utility tracker PowerOutage.us.
The tornado formed amid a potent Pacific storm that helped to transport an atmospheric river over the northern half of the state, with a “cold frontal rain band” bringing up the rear Saturday, forecasters with the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes said in a statement.
In the small city of Mill Valley, about 14 miles north of San Francisco, police said floodwaters stranded several vehicles. In Novato, about 28 miles north of San Francisco, there was a citywide power outage amid storm-felled utility polls and power lines, the city said on social media platform X. It urged residents to “stay home.”
The center rated the atmospheric river at moderate to strong, or AR2 to AR3 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the strongest.
The weather service office in Monterey blamed “a rather potent frontal passage” for the unsettled weather associated with the tail end of the atmospheric river, which included hail, ripping winds, and nearly 2 inches of rain in places, along with snow inland.
The weather service office in Reno, Nevada, forecast as much as 20 inches of snow in the Lake Tahoe and Mammoth Lakes areas of California between Friday and Saturday.
For the Bay Area, the forecast was for a night of freezing temperatures, bottoming out near 30 degrees, followed by “sunny skies” on Sunday, the weather service said in its forecast discussion Saturday.
Alex Lo, Linda Takahashi and Michelle Acevedo contributed.
