Storm clears out of North Bay

<p>The brunt of the storm that hit the North Bay late Monday and made a mess of the commute, roads, roofs and trees on Tuesday has passed, leaving showers and moderate temperatures in its wake.</p><p>“What was a blanket of rain and high winds have now switched off to showers and winds 10 to 15 mph,” said meteorologist Diane Henderson of the National Weather Service in Monterey. “The 60 percent chance of rain today will ratchet down to 10 or 20 Thursday.”</p><p>Wednesday morning, roads were wet but clear with little of the standing water that splashed windows and forced temporary lane closures while crews cleared clogged culverts.</p><p>“So far, so good,” said Jesus Ruiz, a spokesman at the Caltrans traffic management center in Oakland. “It seems like everything has past. There is still a lot of debris, frayed branches and everything up there.”</p><p>The Oakland center on Tuesday logged 4,400 incidents.</p><p>“On a scale of 1 to 10, the storm was an 8,” Henderson said. “There were good sized winds, a lot of people lost their power, the CHP logs was overtaxed with reports coming in. With people being inconvenienced, it was a 9 or a 10.”</p><p>Henderson said temperatures are forecast to be 68 Wednesday in Santa Rosa, with partly cloudy skies. The evening will bring a slight chance of rain with south east winds 5 to 15 miles per hour and lows in the 50s.</p><p>On Thursday, temperatures will be in the low 70s with winds about 5 mile per hour or less.</p><p>From midnight to 7 a.m. today, just less than a half inch of rain has fallen at the Sonoma County-Charles M. Schulz Airport, bringing the storm total there to 3.54 inches.</p><p>The next chance of rain is Sunday or Monday, when a storm approaches the coast from the northwest.</p><p>“That will be terribly weak and there are no typhoons anywhere near there, so there should be not much of a hiccup,” Henderson said.</p><p>There was still a small craft warning in effect off Bodega Bay on Wednesday, with an 11.5-foot swell from the west and winds at about 10 mph, according to the Coast Guard.</p><p>Roads were closed sporadically throughout Sonoma County on Tuesday as rain and winds brought down trees into lanes and power lines, but as of Wednesday morning, the only road that remained closed by fallen trees was Mill Creek Road, according to the public works department.</p><p>There are two remaining outages in Sonomna County, the largest affecting 136 residents along Mark West Springs Road, which started at 12:50 p.m. Tuesday. Crews are hampered by access to the site, said PG&E spokeswoman Jana Morris.</p><p>There are also 26 residents still without power in Geyserville, Morris said.</p><p>Morris said the “one-day storm” had a significant impact on PG&E's statewide system, especially in the central coast and north valley.</p><p>System-wide, PG&E replaced 146 poles, 108 miles of wire, 194 transformers and 355 crossarms, she said, adding that about 700,000 customers were affected. Of these, all but 63,000 have had their power restored as of noon today, she said.</p><p>At Coddingtown Mall in Santa Rosa, some shop ownhers welcomed mall management's response this morning to damage caused by yesterday's storm. At several ground-floor businesses, rain penetrated the mall's roof and brought down ceiling tiles.</p><p>“We've just had a flood of people in the store cleaning up the water mess, drying us out doing everything they needed to do — it's wonderful,” said John Furtado, owner of Village Sewing Center.</p><p>“They assured us that the whole floor above is going to be sealed so no water can leak into our store, and they said they were going to replace ceiling tiles,” Furtado said.</p><p>Harvey Martin, thw owner of Lamplight Gallery II, said crews were in his shop as well. Large fans and humidifiers were brought in to dry is water logged carpet, he said. He said the storm cause no damage to his collection of Thomas Kinkade paintings.</p><p>“When we got that little rain a while ago, which was not much more than a sprinkle, we had leaks that day,” Martin said. “When we heard the storm was coming in we moved everything.”</p>