A rare tornado ripped through Northern California on Saturday, flipping over cars, damaging homes and businesses and leaving thousands without power.
Photos and video from Santa Cruz County showed the town of Scotts Valley was the hardest hit, with Christmas shoppers evacuated as severe weather battered the region.
In one video, a woman can be heard shouting “Let's go home, let's go home” as debris rains down on the couple's car on one of the main thoroughfares around 1:30 p.m. local time.
Local authorities said several people were injured and significant damage was reported from the short-lived tornado, which was determined to be an EF-1 on the Fujita scale with winds of 90 mph.
Some local roads will remain closed into the evening and are expected to remain closed until at least Sunday morning, according to the Scotts Valley Police Department.
Police say this is to allow repairs to damaged power lines and other equipment and to allow crews to remove debris and other hazards from roads and surrounding areas.
A few hours ago, powerful storms pounded the state, prompting San Francisco to issue its first-ever tornado warning.
National Weather Service investigators surveyed the damage left behind by the powerful storm and estimated that straight-line winds of about 80 miles per hour were responsible for the damage.
At the height of the severe weather, PowerOutage.us reported more than 128,000 power outages in the Golden State, most of them south of the Bay Area and in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
According to NOAA databasetornadoes are rare in much of the western United States.
Since 1950, fewer than 500 tornadoes have been reported in California, resulting in injuries but no deaths.
According to the NWS office in Sacramento, there are an average of 11 cases each year, with the most occurring in the spring and fall.
The atmospheric river event that caused the recent string of severe weather is expected to subside on Sunday before another round of heavy rain approaches the coast on Monday and Tuesday.
