Tornado alley it’s not, but a section of California was hit Saturday with a rare tornado that has been blamed for injuring five and flipping vehicles as a storm moved across the state.

A tornado in Scotts Valley, a small city about 6 miles north of Santa Cruz “threw multiple cars off the road,” the city police department said on Facebook, where it posted images of overturned vehicles.

Police Capt. Scott Garner said five people, most in vehicles that were tossed or moved by the tornado, suffered injuries, but none of them were major. Three were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries while two refused treatment at the scene, he said.

Photos shared by the Scotts Valley Police Department showed cars strewn about on and around Mount Hermon Road, the city’s main street and retail district, where the tornado touched down in the afternoon.

Officers responding to the scene were called to reports of a multi-vehicle collision, but were astonished to see instead the aftermath of a tornado, including bent utility poles and extensive property damage, Garner said.

“You can imagine officers responding finding telephone poles at angles,” he said. “They stumbled into that.”

The National Weather Service issued a local storm report that confirmed a touchdown in Scotts Valley at 1:40 p.m. It does not estimate the tornado’s strength, a task completed in person when it’s safe to do so.

California averages only about 11 tornadoes each year, with the northern Central Valley being the part of the state most likely to see one, according to the weather service.

Earlier Saturday, the weather service had issued a tornado warning for San Francisco shortly before 6 a.m., but it was canceled after no tornado organized in the area.

The warning was the first for San Francisco city and county at least since the inception of reliable weather records in 1950, said Nicole Sarment, a weather service meteorologist in the Bay Area.

In Scotts Valley, the area of Mount Hermon Road was expected to remain closed at least through Sunday morning as authorities assess damage and Pacific Gas & Electric repairs infrastructure and restores electricity, police said in a series of statements on Facebook.

On Saturday evening, more than 8,800 utility customers in Santa Cruz County were in the dark, according to utility tracker PowerOutage.us.

The tornado formed amid a potent Pacific storm that helped to transport an atmospheric river over the northern half of the state, with a “cold frontal rain band” bringing up the rear Saturday, forecasters with the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes said in a statement.

In the small city of Mill Valley, about 14 miles north of San Francisco, police said floodwaters stranded several vehicles. In Novato, about 28 miles north of San Francisco, there was a citywide power outage amid storm-felled utility polls and power lines, the city said on social media platform X. It urged residents to “stay home.”

The center rated the atmospheric river at moderate to strong, or AR2 to AR3 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the strongest.

The weather service office in Monterey blamed “a rather potent frontal passage” for the unsettled weather associated with the tail end of the atmospheric river, which included hail, ripping winds, and nearly 2 inches of rain in places, along with snow inland.

The weather service office in Reno, Nevada, forecast as much as 20 inches of snow in the Lake Tahoe and Mammoth Lakes areas of California between Friday and Saturday.

For the Bay Area, the forecast was for a night of freezing temperatures, bottoming out near 30 degrees, followed by “sunny skies” on Sunday, the weather service said in its forecast discussion Saturday.

Two cases of bird flu have been reported in California’s San Joaquin county, according to local health officials.

According to a press release issued on Friday and reported by the Sacramento Bee, health officials from San Joaquin county public health services said that both cases occurred in farmworkers who had had exposure to infected animals. Both individuals have exhibited mild symptoms and are recovering, officials said, adding that there are 34 confirmed cases in total across California.

In a warning issued on Facebook, health officials said that bird flu is “spreading in some farm animals like poultry and cows” and urged residents to take precautions to prevent the spread of the disease.

The precautions included using protective gear when working with poultry, dairy cows or other animals that could be infected, as well as when handling raw and unpasteurized milk.

Suggested protective gear include respirators approved by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, goggles or face shields, coveralls, head cover, boots and gloves.

Across the country, there are currently a total of 60 confirmed cases of bird flu. Although the majority of the cases are coming from California, other states with confirmed cases include Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, Texas and Washington, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Symptoms of bird flu – which stems from a type of influenza A virus – include pink eye or conjunctivitis, fever, fatigue, cough, muscle aches, sore throat, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, stuffy or runny nose as well as shortness of breath. The majority of the recent cases of bird flu have caused pink eye and mild respiratory symptoms, Cleveland Clinic stated on its website.

Treatments for bird flu typically consist of antiviral drugs including Oseltamivir, Peramivir or Zanamivir.

San Francisco’s housing market is still suffering, with condos in the Californian city being sold for as little as half their original value.

The city—a magnet for the thriving tech sector—expected a rise in housing demand after rapid developments in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry. However, sales on condos, particularly in the downtown area are still making losses, to the point where San Francisco is the only major city in the U.S. in which it is cheaper to live now than it was five years ago.

Public listings for condos in San Francisco show heavy reductions in price, with one unit, previously sold for $1.2 million in 2019, settling at $825,000. That’s a decrease of more than 30 percent.

In one particularly bad example, a condo on Mission Street in the heart of the city was sold for $775,000. In 2015, the same unit was worth $1.4 million, meaning it had lost almost 50 percent of its value in a decade.

Realtor expert Rohin Dhar described the sales as “brutal.” According to his research, San Francisco is the only major urban area where housing costs have gone down. It is 1 percent cheaper to live there now than it was in 2019, while the average American city dweller, it’s 48 percent more expensive.

The decline in condo prices in San Francisco started during the pandemic, as working-from-home initiatives and office closures led to a decline in workers needing to live in the city.

Between 2020 and the start of 2024, the average value of a condo in San Francisco dropped by 12.8 percent, from $1.14 million to just $997,000, according to Zillow, a real-estate marketplace tracker.

Recent developments in the AI industry led many to believe that interest in San Francisco property could recover, as the city remains a vital part of the U.S. tech sector and is a global hub for AI advancements. OpenAI, the producer of the widely-used chatbot ChatGPT, is based there, along with a thriving start-up industry.

Any benefits from this boost are yet to be seen, with condo prices still not recovering to pre-pandemic value. However, changing attitudes to in-person working could help restore the market.

Over two-thirds of professional U.S. companies said that their new job ads will no longer have the option of fully remote work this year, indicating a return to the office in 2025 that could herald the same demand for San Francisco housing that raised values so much in the first place.

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