By Thomas Gase, Times-Herald, Vallejo, Calif. The Tribune Content Agency
After a couple of days of stagnation, this week's atmospheric river storm that has brought possibly record rainfall to the North Bay is finally expected to move again on Friday.
The result was widespread showers all of Friday. This time, no section of the Bay Area is expected to be spared, according to the National Weather Service.
However, the City of Vallejo is not opening an extreme weather center. On Tuesday, when the atmospheric river storm began in the Bay Area, Assistant to the City Manager Natalie Peterson wrote the Times-Herald: "The City is not currently opening an extreme weather center (warming center) as the current conditions do not meet opening criteria. Staff will continue to monitor the weather closely to see if anything changes."
Conditions for opening a center must be either two consecutive days of temperatures below an overnight low of 35 degrees Fahrenheit, or two consecutive nights of rainfall with major or extreme risk levels as determined by the National Weather Service.
According to the National Weather Service an atmospheric river is "relatively narrow regions in the atmosphere that are responsible for most of the transport of water vapor from the tropics. Atmospheric rivers come in all shapes and sizes but those that contain the largest amounts of water vapor and strongest winds are responsible for extreme rainfall events and floods. This type of hydrologic event can affect the entire west coast of North America. These extreme events can disrupt travel, induce mudslides, and cause damage to life and property."
Flood warnings remained in effect Friday morning in most areas of the North Bay including Vallejo and most of Solano County.
Yet the city still hasn't opened a center, angering many in the unsheltered community, some who their homes earlier this week in a multi-agency cleanup on Sacramento Street near White Slough.
"The City of Vallejo's inability to understand the stressful conditions that my unsheltered friends must endure during extreme winter weather conditions is willfully refusing to open a Warming Center," said longtime unsheltered and housing advocate Joey Carrizales. "It's another example of City of Vallejo's so-called 'leaders' causing unnecessary traumatic health conditions and dreadful harm to an unsheltered person whose status in life is being judged wrongly."
Nicole Rivera, who was kicked out of the encampment on Monday and Tuesday was also upset.
"How does the city really sleep at night when we have hundreds of homeless people who live in the cold and rain?" Rivera asked. "It's hard to understand the way people even have jobs doing this kind of stuff to people that know have no place to go. Yet they bulldozed everything and would not let us get the rest of our things. They were rude and disrespectful as hell. They wouldn't let anyone get their things. We have no places to go."
The rain is set to let up for a few hours on Saturday according to weather.com, but showers took place Friday and were scheduled for Saturday morning before continuing Sunday through Tuesday. The temperatures overnight are expected to be anywhere from 50 to 42 degrees.
"Those people who have been watching the North Bay get slammed are going to be the ones who feel it (Friday)," NWS meteorologist Dylan Flynn said early Friday. "This front is gonna start to march south in the later part of the morning, and you're gonna have rain impacts everywhere."
In the East Bay, that likely means 1 1/2 inches of rain will fall, and in the South Bay and Peninsula, about 1 to 1 1/2 inches are expected, according to the weather service. Those totals would be significantly higher than those areas saw when the first wave of the storm arrived Wednesday.
As for the North Bay, the rain will be steady and add to the deluge that part of the region already has received, Flynn said.
In Sonoma County, Santa Rosa has been hit particularly hard. The city received more than 7 inches of rain Wednesday and has totaled 9.6 inches over a 48-hour period, Flynn said. Another half-inch of rain "should happen easily," he said, giving the city its highest three-day total of rain since records began being kept in 1902, according to the weather service.
"This storm front basically hasn't moved at all," Flynn said. "The reason for that is that the atmospheric river is mostly stationary, and what we have was not the direct impact of it. But because that system was so strong as it moved in from the north (near British Columbia), we got the strong effects of it. It's been anchored by some of the lowest pressure we've ever seen in the Pacific Ocean, so there was just nowhere for it to go."
The change to that, says Flynn, comes because the original atmospheric river system "kind of has spawned a child. A new low-pressure system has formed and that's going to be the one that pushes the parent system south."
The expected all-day rain that comes with it also is likely to include harsh southerly winds that are anticipated to wreak havoc with trees and utility wires. In the Bay Area, they are expected to blow at least 25 mph and could get as high as 40 mph, according to the weather service.