Gusty, damaging winds whip through Bay Area, Northern California; fire danger high

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    SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) — Strong wind gusts ripped through Northern California overnight and into Wednesday, causing some damage and keeping fire crews on alert.

The National Weather Service said offshore winds were in the 30 to 40 mph range with gusts up to 60 mph. Locations above 2,500 feet were seeing gusts of 70+ mph.

The Bay Area and Northern California have been under a Red Flag Warning since Tuesday lasting until 7 a.m. Thursday. The Weather Service said the winds combined with low humidity levels created critical fire weather conditions and prompted the alert for all interior Bay Area zones, the Sacramento Valley, and higher terrains of the Central Coast.

The wind appeared to partially collapse scaffolding on a building in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood. The San Francisco Fire Department said Wednesday morning in a social media post that the scaffolding failure on the 1900 block of Broadway was “likely a wind-related issue.” because of 30 mph winds in the area.

The conditions also triggered a new round of public safety power outages from Pacific Gas and Electric. Thousands of outages began Tuesday evening across the region and lasted into Wednesday.

PG&E said on top of those outages, there were another 7,500 Bay Area customers without power because of weather issues like downed wires, on top of the more than 16,000 in the region impacted by the public safety shutoff.

“As forecasted, fierce winds entered PG&E’s service area last night with peak wind gusts observed at 88 mph in St. Helena in Napa County,” PG&E said in a press statement Wednesday.

The Weather Service also issued a Wind Advisory from 4 p.m. Tuesday through 3 p.m. Wednesday for the Bay Area and Sacramento Valley.

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