One year later: A look back the historic Salinas wind storm

February 17 th marks the one year anniversary of one of the most destructive wind storms the Central Coast has seen in decades. Downed trees and power lines littered roadways across the region.

“The magnitude of what happened last year, I haven’t seen that in my 25 years here,” recalled Brett Loomis, Interim Fire Chief for the Salinas Fire Department.

On that day last year, a storm moved towards the Central Coast and winds were forecast to become breezy, but as the weather models continued to update, the winds became stronger and raised some concern.

Brian Garcia, Warning Coordination Meteorologist for the National Weather Service office in Monterey recalls that day as well. “I think surface winds in the high resolution models were showing somewhere in the 60 knot range which is somewhere in the 70 plus miles per hour range. When you see that you think ‘okay, is this an outlier or is this legitimate?’ None of the other models were showing it that strong, so we kind of took it as an outlier but we started ramping up the winds a little bit more.”

As the storm came through early that morning, calls started to come in about strong winds causing damage across Salinas. “The winds really hit Salinas about 4 o’clock in the morning with pretty significant gusts. I think a couple of times we had hurricane strength winds,” said Loomis. He got the call early that morning and headed to work. “Within three blocks of my house I stopped at three different trees down. One onto a house, one onto a car, and one just blocking the middle of the roadway. So right off the bat, I knew this was going to be a significant event.”

KION Meteorologist Jason Atcho remember reporting outside in the strong winds last year. After the morning newscast, he and others headed out to check out the damage across town. “There are tons of trees down all over the place. We saw it just driving a half mile from the station to the airport” he reported last year.

Loomis says there wasn’t really an area that was spared in the city. The damage was everywhere. “I responded to calls in every part of our town with trees onto house and trees onto power lines. We had North Main closed between Bernal and Laurel for a good part of the day and into the evening because we had seven or eight of these eucalyptus trees that fell down across the roadway.” While most of the damage is cleaned up, you can still see where some of those large trees once stood.

Last year’s storm still serves as an important reminder. Officials encourage people to reach out and get to know their neighbors, especially those who might need help in an emergency. That’s because in a major disaster, emergency services will be stretched thin. “People might need to be on their own for up to 72 hours. That’s a long time for someone who’s fit and capable and prepared to take care of themselves. For someone who’s not, that’s an eternity,” said Loomis.

Although this winter has been relatively tame, winter isn’t over just yet. “It’s important that we remain in that mode and in that mindset that anything can happen,” said Garcia.

That day ended up being a historic day for the Salinas Fire Department. On an average day they get 40 to 45 emergency responses. On that day, they had 254 in just a 12 hour period.