Good morning. It’s Friday, March 10.
- Central Coast and Sierra foothills brace for impact.
- A bank’s stumble panics Silicon Valley startup industry.
- And California sues Huntington Beach over housing goals.
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California storms
1.
The warnings from weather officials grew slightly more dire on Thursday as California’s latest atmospheric river made landfall and began to lash the coast. The “bullseye” of the storm, climate scientist Daniel Swain said, will be the western flank of the southern Sierra Nevada and the coastal region between Monterey and San Luis Obispo. Flash flood warnings for both regions were upgraded from “moderate” to “high” risk as the storm surges in intensity on Friday.
By late Thursday, there were already reports of rescues, mudslides, and power outages across parts of the Central Coast and wine country. At least seven rivers were on track to rise above flood stage, most of them on Friday. “This is a very dynamic system,” said Karla Nemeth, of the California Department of Water Resources. “Rivers and creeks can rise very quickly, so it does have the potential to be a very dangerous situation, especially in areas that experienced flooding before.” Weather Channel | Press Democrat | S.F. Chronicle
Good Twitter accounts for live Storm updates:
2.
Other storm developments:
- The break after this storm will be short, forecasters said. Yet another atmospheric river, packing heavy rain and snow, is on tap for Monday through Wednesday. @NWSSacramento
- Tiny Pacific Valley School in Big Sur has been closed since early January because of blocked roads. Ellen Hall, a teacher, said no one is OK: “People are being pressed so hard. And that is definitely being seen in the kids.” Mercury News
- Snowbound cattle in Humboldt County are dying from starvation. So rescue workers went up in helicopters and dropped bundles of hay from the sky. S.F. Chronicle
- Some Sierra resorts are pushing 600 inches of snow for the season, at least 200 inches above the norm. Here’s a nicely done photo essay on California’s see-it-to-believe-it snow. 👉Washington Post
Statewide
3.
When the newspaper chain Gannett combined with Gatehouse in 2019, it grew include at least nine California newspapers, including essential outlets such as the Palm Springs Desert Sun, the Redding Record Searchlight, and the Stockton Record. Some saw the merger as a hopeful sign; at least the buyer wasn’t a hedge fund, they said. But since then, Gannett has eliminated nearly 60% of its workforce, new filings showed. “It’s as if,” wrote Joshua Benton, “instead of merging America’s two largest newspaper chains, one of them was simply wiped off the face of the earth.” Nieman Lab | Axios
4.
Elon Musk left his California home more than two years ago, saying he had lost patience with the state’s rules and regulations. A new report has now revealed that he’s been secretly laying plans to build his own utopian town on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. It would be a company town, dubbed Snailbrook, with below-market housing for workers at nearby Boring, Tesla, and SpaceX facilities. Wall Street Journal
Chap Ambrose, who lives nearby, flew drones over the site seeking clues. YouTube
Northern California
5.
Silicon Valley Bank, a linchpin of tech industry financing, set off a panic in the start-up industry when the lender announced late Wednesday that it had hastily sold off $21 billion of its holdings to shore up its finances. The bank’s troubles dragged down its peers as investors worried about bigger problems across the industry. The four biggest U.S. banks lost $52 billion in market value, while Silicon Valley Bank’s stock price fell 60%. Anshu Sharma, a tech executive, urged calm. “There are two things in life that only exist if you believe in them,” he said. “God and bank runs.” N.Y. Times | Bloomberg
6.
For more than a decade, the sidewalk in front of Susan Meyer’s San Francisco Victorian has been a cheerful little hub, with a bench and an adorable Little Free Library. Then one anonymous person complained and a notice appeared: remove it all or pay $1,400 for an “encroachment” permit. It’s San Francisco in a nutshell, the columnist Heather Knight wrote: “The same city that mostly shrugs at open-air fentanyl markets, rampant property crime and reckless driving cares intently about the minutiae of what people do with their homes, yards and businesses — and small parts of sidewalks.” S.F. Chronicle
Southern California
7.
California sued Huntington Beach on Thursday, accusing the Orange County community of ignoring its obligations to build new housing. “Nobody gets to pick and choose the laws they want to follow,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said. Hours later, defiant city officials filed their own lawsuit, asking a federal judge to block the state from forcing changes they said would spoil the city’s character. “The people of Huntington Beach don’t want to urbanize our city,” said Huntington Beach Mayor Tony Strickland. “If our residents wanted that, they would move to Los Angeles or San Francisco.” Voice of OC | Wall Street Journal
8.
Robert Blake died at home in Los Angeles on Thursday. The actor, whose seminal role was the real-life murderer Perry Smith in the 1967 film “In Cold Blood,” saw his career eclipsed by accusations that he fatally shot his wife in 2001. He was acquitted, but a civil jury found him liable, ordering him to pay $30 million. The judgement sent him into bankruptcy. He wound up living on social security and a Screen Actor’s Guild pension, hoping for a career revival that never came. He was 89. A.P. | L.A. Times
9.
Nalleli Cobo, pictured above left, was nine when she began suffering from asthma, nosebleeds, and headaches. Others in her South Los Angeles neighborhood were also having health issues. That’s what began a battle against the AllenCo Energy oil site in front of Cobo’s house. They won, forcing the company to halt operations. Cobo is featured in a new photo essay on the consequences of “California’s backyard petroculture.” High Country News
10.
On this week’s California Sun Podcast, host Jeff Schechtman talks with the author Susan Straight, whose latest novel “Mecca” is set in the Inland Empire and high desert areas. Straight described the whole sweep of Southern California as a collection of villages akin to those of America’s great cities, such as Los Angeles or Chicago. Head out of Los Angeles in any direction, she said, “and you when you come out, 100 miles from Los Angeles, you are in a different world.”
11.
From 1957 to 1967, Disneyland offered a tour of a futuristic home in its Tomorrowland area. Walt Disney, one of the of postwar America’s great popularizers of technology, took Tomorrowland seriously, seeing it as a staging area for the future. The house, sponsored by the plastics division of Monsanto, was meant to represent a utopian domicile in 1985, with sleek surfaces and plastic everywhere. “Hardly a natural material appears anywhere,” the original narration said. Some of the predictions were prescient: cordless phones, a flat-screen TV, a sinister sounding contraption called a “microwave oven.” But another was wildly off. The architects designed the home to accommodate extra rooms for hobbies, reasoning that Americans’ leisure time would only increase over time. Eichler Network | WIRED
In case you missed it
12.
Five items that got big views over the past week:
- At the age of 19, Carolyn Adams had fled her square hometown and become the “it girl” of the Bay Area’s early 1960s psychedelic underground. The mythology of that time has been written almost entirely by men. But Adams was taking notes the whole time. Now she’s writing her memoir. Insider
- The “Terrorgram Collective” is at the heart of an international neo-Nazi movement that advocates deadly violence. Its members have been unknown. But a news outlet identified one of the main propagandists as a 33-year-old woman in Sacramento. HuffPost
- Edwin Castro, who came forward last month to claim a $2 billion Powerball jackpot, wasted little time upgrading his living situation. He just spent $25.5 million on a house in a Hollywood Hills neighborhood shared with Ariana Grande, Dakota Johnson, and Jimmy Kimmel. Dirt
- Los Angeles is suddenly awash in waterfalls, the L.A. Times reported. Cris Hazzard, aka the Hiking Guy, recommended Switzer Falls in the San Gabriel Mountains. The short walk there takes you through oaks and alders and across the ruins of a 100-year-old mountain resort. Hiking Guy
- When the daringly brutalist Hyatt Regency debuted in San Francisco in 1973, locals showed up in such droves that management limited elevator access to guests with room keys. Half a century later, the cavernous atrium, rising 17 stories, still dazzles. The photographer Thomas Hawk has a nice gallery of pictures. Flickr
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The California Sun is written by Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times.
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