The latest rainstorm that drenched the East Bay on Sunday brought approximately two inches of rain to Central Contra Costa County towns.
The rain began its 15-hour assault about 8 p.m. Saturday and lasted until about 11 a.m. Sunday. Skies cleared about 2 p.m.
The storm also knocked out power to several thousand East Bay residents and caused a series of four accidents on Highway 24 in Orinda that injured five people. To make matters worse, an outage shut down BART service for an hour Sunday morning.
The National Weather Service forecasts cloudy skies in the East Bay for the rest of the week without chances of rain on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Rainfall Totals
The Sunday morning storm dumped 2.16 inches of rain in Orinda between 5 p.m. Saturday and 5 p.m. Sunday. Since Thursday morning, Orinda got more than 5 1/2 inches of precipitation.
Concord received 1.91 inches of rain from the latest storm. Since Thursday, that community had received almost 4 inches of rain.
Walnut Creek got 1.81 inches of rain on Sunday. It too received almost 4 inches of precipitation.
The summit of Mount Diablo got 3.8 inches on Sunday. The mountain peak received a total of 9 inches of rain in the three storms.
You can see rainfall totals for most Bay Area communities on this chart.
In addition, the Napa, Petaluma and Russian rivers and the Guerneville River were all expected to flood before Monday morning, according to the Bay City News Service.
The USGS is also monitoring several Bay Area creeks approaching flood levels.
Power Outages
On Sunday morning, there were seven outages in central Contra Costa affecting more than 1,600 PG&E customers.
The largest was in Orinda in the Orindawoods area. Power went out there at 8:45 a.m. and affected 789 customers.
In Concord, an 8:30 a.m. outage knocked out electricity to 472 customers in the Farm Bureau Road area.
In Walnut Creek, a 9 a.m. outage took out power to 261 customers in the central part of town.
Almost 70 customers in the Moraga Commons Park area were expected to have power back on at 2 p.m.
In Pleasant Hill, 21 customers lost power at 6:30 a.m. near Las Juntas Park.
In Lafayette, 19 customers in the downtown area lost electricity at 8:45 a.m.
In Martinez, eight customers along Howe Road lost power at about 8 a.m.
Power outages are listed on PG&E's Power Outage Map featured on pge.com. To go directly to the map, click here.
PG&E urges customers to report power outages by calling 800-743-5002. Any downed power lines should be reported by calling 9-1-1.
Highway 24 Accident
On Highway 24 near the Caldecott Tunnel, a series of four accidents happened in the eastbound lanes around 9 a.m. near the Wilder Road exit in Orinda.
The first three crashes were relatively minor. However, in the fourth accident an SUV clipped a Moraga-Orinda Fire Department truck. The SUV flipped on its roof and skidded along the highway
CHP Sgt. Scott Siria said the SUV hit an unknown number of people on the road.
In all, five people were hurt in the four accidents, including three firefighters. All were taken to taken to John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek.
Only one lane of eastbound Highway 24 was open for two hours backing up traffic to the tunnel. The accident scene was cleaned up about 11 a.m. and all lanes were re-opened.
More details of the crash can be found here.
BART Outage
BART service was restored at 10:18 a.m. after all train service was stopped for about an hour.
The interruption was due to a power outage at the BART operations control center, said BART spokesperson Alicia Trost.
When the power was lost, all trains went to the nearest station to unload passengers.
The Contra Costa Times reported: "Around 9:18 a.m. power went out, possibly due to the nasty weather that dumped rain on the Bay Area and as a result trains can't move, said BART police Lt. Randy Gregson."
