Utility crews across the Seattle region scrambled to clear fallen trees and restore power to nearly 300,000 homes, schools and businesses that remained without electricity on Thursday. The storm also deluged Northern California, where firefighters made water rescues as creeks overflowed from torrential rain.
Officials said the outages in Seattle could last into the weekend, even as another round of heavy wind and rain is expected, stretching even farther south this time.
The city of Issaquah, about 20 miles east of Seattle, was among the hardest hit. The storm left roads covered in fallen limbs and downed power lines. Scores of people sought warmth and electricity at the Issaquah Senior Center, said Tina Riehl, who works at the front desk. “The place is filled,” she said. “No power is a big thing.”
Fed by an atmospheric river funneling water from the Pacific Ocean, the storm killed at least two people as it tore through Western Washington this week. It moved south and parked over Northern California, flooding roadways and disrupting transit and air travel. Nearly seven inches of rain fell Wednesday at the airport in Santa Rosa, in California’s wine country north of San Francisco, breaking a one-day record.
Rescuers in Santa Rosa helped evacuate about 150 people on Thursday afternoon after they were surrounded by rising floodwaters. Paul Lowenthal, a division chief with the city’s fire department, said a creek overflowed, spilling water into the parking lot of a Hampton Inn and a health clinic next door, trapping guests, patients and employees.
Water began to pool under more than 100 cars in the parking lot, some of which started to float away, Mr. Lowenthal said. With more heavy rain expected, fire officials were working on a plan to move more people out of harm’s way using rescue vehicles.
“We don’t really see this letting up and receding,” he said.
Another wind-driven storm is forecast to follow a similar path on Friday, stretching farther south into the Bay Area, though it will likely be less intense. Some spots in Northern California could record 16 inches of rainfall by the end of the week as the atmospheric river delivers more rain, snow and winds gusting up to 65 miles per hour.
Forecasters with the National Weather Service predicted that by Friday night, the Eel River in Humboldt County, along California’s rugged North Coast, would probably rise so high that Highway 211, which crosses the waterway, would become impassable.
After so many days of rain, flooding and landslides become increasingly likely as the ground becomes more saturated — a risk that can be made worse by the larger amount of moisture held by a warming atmosphere. Officials are especially concerned about mudslides in a burn scar from the fourth-largest wildfire in California history, which burned thousands of acres this summer between Redding and Sacramento.
In Washington State, a spokeswoman for Puget Sound Energy, Melanie Coon, said the storm had caused the region’s largest power outage since 2006. The utility was seeking to restore power to “the majority of our service areas” by noon on Saturday, she said.
Several of the state’s largest school districts were closed on Thursday, including Bellevue, where 16 out of 28 schools remained without power. It was unclear whether they would be able to open on Friday, said Janine Thorn, a district spokeswoman.
Some hospitals in the Seattle area had to rely on emergency generators after the storm. A spokeswoman for UW Medicine, Susan Gregg, said on Thursday that about a dozen patients had been treated at the system’s three hospitals for storm-related injuries, including from falling trees. One remained in critical condition.
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