Rare California tornado injures 5, overturns vehicles in town north of Santa Cruz

On By Littum

Tornado alley it ain’t, but part of California was hit by a rare tornado on Saturday that has been blamed for injuring five and flipping vehicles as a storm moved across the state.

A tornado in Scotts Valley, a small town about 6 miles north of Santa Cruz “threw several cars off the road,” the town’s police department said on Facebook, posting photos 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 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 scattered on and around Mount Hermon Road, the city’s main street and retail district, where the tornado touched down in the afternoon.

Officers who responded to the scene were called to reports of a multi-vehicle collision but were stunned to instead see the aftermath of a tornado, including bent utility poles and extensive property damage, Garner said.

“You can imagine officers responding and finding telephone poles at angles,” he said. “They fell into it.”

The National Weather Service issued a local storm report confirming a landfall in Scotts Valley at 13.40. It does not estimate tornado strength, a task done in person when it is 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 tornadoes organized in the area.

The warning was the first for the city and county of San Francisco since at least the beginning of reliable weather records in 1950, said Nicole Sarmen, a Bay Area weather service meteorologist.

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 repair infrastructure and restore power, police said in a series of statements on Facebook.

Saturday night, more than 8,800 utility customers in Santa Cruz County were in the dark, according to the utility tracker PowerOutage.us.

The tornado formed in the middle of a powerful Pacific storm that helped carry an atmospheric river across the northern half of the state, with a “cold frontal rainband” bringing up the rear Saturday, forecasters from the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes said in a statement.

In the small town of Mill Valley, about 14 miles north of San Francisco, police said flooding stranded several vehicles. In Novato, about 48 miles north of San Francisco, there was a citywide power outage amid downed utility meters and power lines, the city said on social media platform X. It urged residents to “stay home.”

The center rated the atmospheric river as 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 fairly potent frontal passage” for the erratic weather associated with the tail end of the atmospheric river, which included hail, gusty winds and nearly 2 inches of rain in some places, along with inland snow.

The weather service office in Reno, Nevada, is predicting 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.

Dennis Romero

Dennis Romero is a breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.

Alex Lo, Linda Takahashi and Michelle Acevedo the contribution.