First Storm of Season Lashes N. California

The belated first storm of the season smashed into Northern and Central California Monday, dropping welcome snow in the Sierra but disrupting power and traffic and causing a huge sinkhole to open in an exclusive San Francisco neighborhood.

The 40-foot-deep sinkhole swallowed an expensive house in the Sea Cliff area near the Presidio and forced the evacuation of nearby homes. No one was injured.

After six months of bone-dry weather and unusually mild temperatures that had water watchers muttering about possible drought, when winter showed its face it was an ornery one.

Ten inches of snow fell at Mammoth Mountain, and in some reaches of Northern California on Monday it was raining an inch every hour. Winds whipped off the mountaintops around Lake Tahoe at 118 mph.

Two more storms, packing an even more ferocious punch, were waiting in the wings, due to arrive from the north Pacific this week. Ocean swells were predicted to reach 30 feet in the Bay Area, and authorities issued a rare coastal flood watch and small stream flood advisories for several counties.

A much weaker system could hit Southern California by midweek.

For farmers, hydrologists and ski resort operators, the wet weather was the answer to their prayers. But many others wondered why it had to come down so hard after such a long wait.

“Winter has come barging in the door with a vengeance,” said Curtis Brack of WeatherData. “It’s never good to go from drought-like conditions to lots of rain really fast because the dry ground can’t absorb it all.”

Without a drop of rain since summer--one of the driest spells on record--many roads in Central and Northern California were slick Monday with a perilous combination of oil and water. More than 50 accidents were blamed on the weather, including a fatal collision on California 37 near Vallejo.

And because winter was so late coming, many trees still had leaves that fell all at once in the high winds, clogging runoff drains and flooding streets. Two feet of standing water closed the westbound lanes of Interstate 80 past Richmond, causing a two-hour delay in the commute to downtown San Francisco.

Along El Camino del Mar in the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco, the street began sinking after storm waters ruptured an antiquated sewer line at 2:30 a.m. Monday. One fancy Tudor house--unoccupied at the time--was swallowed up whole and broken into bits.

A second house on the block lost its garage and foundation and was teetering on the brink of the 200-foot-by-400-foot chasm. The occupants of the house heard a rumbling, felt the ground move and figured that there had been a major earthquake.

They raced outside and discovered that their garage, along with two vehicles, had collapsed into the hole. “It’s like a large animal has taken a bite out of the block,” said John Bitoff, director of San Francisco’s Office of Emergency Services.

Authorities evacuated another dozen houses in the neighborhood, and fire crews were trying to pump the water spewing from the collapsed pipe and divert it away from the threatened houses. One of the houses tucked in the redwoods was once the home of famed photographer Ansel Adams.

Neighbors surveying the scene Monday were calling the ever-expanding hole “the pit” and “the abyss.” “Sticking out of it, you can see the rubble of a house, toppled power lines and trees, including this one palm tree at an odd angle,” said Richard Nason.

The storm’s intensity raised the specter of landslides across Northern California, but the National Weather Service said it would be difficult to predict when and where they might occur. Because of federal budget cuts, the service noted, the U.S. Geological Survey had discontinued its landslide warning system.

In the Sierra, anxious ski resorts were almost giddy over the prospect that Monday’s storm would be followed by more. Incline Village at Lake Tahoe was forced to hold its annual winter festival last week without snow, and the local ski resorts had canceled their national collegiate ski event because of bare mountains.

“It’s finally here,” said Jim Jeffers of the Incline Village Chamber of Commerce. “This is the perfect snow, heavy and wet, to build a great base.”

The Tioga Pass road across the high country of Yosemite National Park finally shut down for the winter after being kept open long past its usual closing.

“We’ve alerted our folks in Southern California to get your skis and poles and boots ready,” said Wendy Kelley of the Mammoth Mountain ski resort. “It’s going to be a white Christmas after all.”

As welcome as they are, this week’s storms will not make up for fall’s dryness. Maurice Roos, the state chief hydrologist, said October and November were so dry that it would take nothing short of a prolonged deluge to get the rainfall total back to normal.

“If the forecasts are correct, these storms are going to make for a much better picture, though it won’t restore what we lost because of October and November,” he said.

Even if this winter comes up short, Roos said, the state has enough leftover water from the record winter of 1994-95 to avert water shortages.

In a 24-hour period ending at 4 p.m. Monday, San Francisco received 3.57 inches of rain, San Rafael 5.6 inches, Kentfield 6.89 inches, Sacramento 1.69 inches and Fresno 0.36 inches.

“There’s a cold front coming in so these next storms will be dropping snow as low as 5,000 feet,” said WeatherData’s Brack. “The heaviest rain and strongest winds will be over the Bay Area east to Truckee.”

Arax reported from Fresno, Dolan from San Francisco. Times researcher Norma Kaufman contributed to this story in San Francisco.