San Francisco, CA
How meteorologists tracked the tornado risk in Scotts Valley, San Francisco
The intense weather seen all around the Bay Area this weekend made for long days for the employees at the National Weather Service’s Bay Area offices in Monterey. The first-ever tornado warning was issued for San Francisco on Saturday and a tornado was confirmed later that day in Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz County.
While having one tornado warning and another actual tornado all in one day might be common in other parts of the country, in the Bay Area, it’s a rarity.
As SFGate first reported, two National Weather Service Bay Area meteorologists had a long day Saturday as they started the day surveying damage in San Francisco and finished the day responding to the tornado in Santa Cruz County.
The two meteorologists, Brian Garcia and Dalton Behringer, started their morning on Saturday at the NWS Monterey offices.
At 5:50 in the morning, Behringer recalled clocking in as his colleagues who had been up all night working had just issued the first-ever tornado warning for San Francisco. Behringer said that a warning was issued due to what NWS had seen on the radar, which indicated there might have been a tornado in San Francisco.
Once the storm had passed, Behringer and Garcia drove up to San Francisco around 10:00 a.m. to investigate whether a tornado had touched down. They found the most intense tree damage on the western end of Golden Gate Park around the Bison Paddock.
“You couldn’t look a single direction without seeing a tree down somewhere or branches down somewhere,” Behringer recalled.
However, the meteorologists noticed something about the way the trees had fallen: they all fell in the same direction. They observed other notable damage in the Richmond District, the Presidio, the Mission, and Bernal Heights, but ultimately, they found no evidence of a tornado.
Behringer said that based on weather conditions, there might have been a funnel cloud or water spout while the storm was over the water near San Francisco. Still, because the peak of the storm happened before sunrise, there isn’t any documentation of that.
While the meteorologists were wrapping up in San Francisco Saturday afternoon, they got a call from their office alerting them that Scotts Valley had a tornado.
So Behringer and Garcia were then dispatched from San Francisco to Santa Cruz County, trying to get there in time to make the most of the remaining daylight hours.
When they arrived in Scotts Valley, the meteorologists saw many downed trees, downed power lines, damaged cars, and debris strewn across a retail center parking lot.
Unlike the scene in San Francisco, they saw what Behringer called the tell-tale sign of a tornado in Scotts Valley: debris strewn in multiple different directions.
“You look to your right and there’s a sign that fell this way and you look to your left and there’s a sign that fell the other way and that’s exactly the thing that we look for,” Behringer explained.
The team determined that the tornado was an EF1 strength because of the cars it flipped over.
In a month where Bay Area residents are getting lots of practice with emergency warnings, many are wondering: why was a tornado warning issued for San Francisco and not Santa Cruz County?
Behringer explained that several factors played into this. He noted that the NWS put a special marine warning in place when the storm was over the water near Santa Cruz. He said that the warning also advised about the possibility of water spouts as the storm passed over the water.
Behringer said the NWS issued a severe thunderstorm warning about ten minutes before the tornado hit. He added that the advised actions for a severe thunderstorm warning in the Bay Area are the same as those for a tornado.
Move to the lowest floor of your home or business and get to the most interior room,” he said.
“With a lack of ground verification, and just taking into account what had happened earlier in the day, and having the knowledge with us surveying that the tornado actually didn’t touch down in San Francisco, I think that kind of prompted a little hesitancy as far as going full tornado warning,” Behringer said of the warnings for the Santa Cruz County weather event.
Behringer noted these storms happen fast, and it is hard to get real-time information, especially in less-populated areas like Santa Cruz County.
In San Francisco, on Sundays, many residents made their own on-the-ground observations as they walked through the toppled trees throughout the city.
San Francisco residents Sharaya Souza and Matthew Crane walked through Golden Gate Park on Sunday, in part, to check on the bison in the park’s Bison Paddock after the storm.
“A couple of fences were crushed,” Crane said of the Bison Paddock, noting that while the bison were still enclosed, there was damage to the area around them.
Souza said she’s seeing more damage from this storm in the park than previous ones.
“Especially from last year, there were a lot of fallen trees and we had really heavy rainfall, and I feel like this year it’s just taken an even bigger hit,” she noted
While the Bay Area is not known for tornadoes, Behringer said the conditions and the chances aligned Saturday.
“The fact that we were doing two separate damage surveys yesterday in the same day was quite astonishing,” he added, calling Saturday a “standout day” in his work four years with NWS Bay Area.
Behringer said his colleagues continue to survey the Scotts Valley location for more details. Saturday was certainly a noteworthy day for Bay Area weather, and one meteorologist will continue to study.
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — A Silver Alert was activated Thursday by the California Highway Patrol after an 85-year-old man was reported missing from South San Francisco.
Zosimo Carmen is described by authorities as 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighing 155 pounds. He has gray hair and brown eyes.
Carmen was last seen around 2 a.m. on Thursday in the area of James Court and Livingston Place in South San Francisco. He was wearing a brown flannel shirt and blue sweatpants.
The Silver Alert was activated for San Mateo and San Francisco counties.
Anyone who sees Carmen is asked to call 911.
San Francisco, CA
San Francisco Giants honor Willie Mays with highway designation on what would have been his 95th birthday
The San Francisco Giants announced a fitting tribute to one of the best players in the history of Major League Baseball on Wednesday afternoon.
Willie Mays, the legendary center fielder and Hall of Famer, would have turned 95 on Wednesday. And the Giants, in conjunction with Mays’ Say Hey Foundation, along with several other sponsoring parties, will be designating a portion of a local freeway as the Willie Mays Highway.
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Hall of Famer Willie Mays tips his cap during introductions for Game 1 of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Detroit Tigers in San Francisco on Oct. 24, 2012. (Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee/AP)
This designation will cover a portion of Interstate 80 where the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge reaches the city near Oracle Park, the Giants’ home stadium. Signs on I-80 have already been installed with the new designation, a way for Mays to become a permanent part of the San Francisco Bay Area and his home franchise.
Giants personnel spoke about the honor and what it meant to have a “reminder” of his infectious spirit and personality next to the stadium.
DODGERS’ SHOHEI OHTANI BLASTS HOMER IN WIN, ACHIEVES STATISTICAL FEAT UNSEEN SINCE WILLIE MAYS
“What an incredibly special way to honor Willie’s legacy,” said Larry Baer, Giants president and CEO according to MLB.com “For generations, this portion of I-80 on the Bay Bridge has carried Giants fans into San Francisco, and now it will forever carry Willie’s name—a lasting reminder of the joy and inspiration he brought to this city. It is also fitting that this same span of the bridge is named after former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown Jr., two great San Franciscans.”
San Francisco Giants players Orlando Cepeda and Willie Mays stand at the Polo Grounds in New York on Sept. 11, 1963, during a game against the New York Mets. (Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images)
Mays came to the Bay with the Giants in 1958, and has a list of accomplishments to rival any other player in MLB history. A 24-time All-Star, two-time MVP, 12-time Gold Glove winner and 660 home runs, the sixth-highest number by an individual player.
Jeff Idelson, the executive director of the Say Hey Foundation, also issued a statement celebrating the announcement.
“Wille was more than a baseball great, he was a part of the fabric that helped define San Francisco culture for more than a half century,” said Idelson. “Not only is this a fitting way to recognize his lasting contribution to the community, but it furthers Willie’s legacy as a national icon.”
Willie Mays visits PS 46 in Harlem, next to the site of the former Polo Grounds where the New York Giants played before moving to San Francisco in 1958, on Jan. 21, 2011, in New York City. (Michael Nagle/Getty Images)
One of the state senators who introduced the bill paving the way for this designation was Bill Dodd from nearby Napa, who also added, “I cannot think of anyone better to welcome people traveling across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco than Willie Mays. He was an inspiration to so many of us growing up. I was so pleased to have had a part in making this happen.”
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The combination of speed, power, defense and joy Mays played the game with is incredibly rare, which is why his legacy is still viewed with such importance today, nearly 53 years after he retired. Hopefully, the next generation of baseball fans will stay familiar with his career thanks to this reminder.
San Francisco, CA
DoJ closes San Francisco immigration court in move critics say worsens case backlog
The Department of Justice shuttered a major San Francisco immigration court last week, a decision attorneys say could exacerbate the Bay Area’s immigration case backlog.
Early in the year, news reports emerged of the closure of the courthouse on 100 Montgomery Street slated for January 2027. Over the last year, the Department of Justice had fired 20 of the court’s 22 judges (the Trump administration has been accused of culling certain immigration judges, in favor of those more amenable to its ongoing mass deportation agenda).
The justice department’s executive office for immigration review (EOIR) described the court’s closure as “cost effective” in a statement last week. A smaller court in San Francisco remains open, but the majority of court operations will move to an immigration court 35 miles (56km) away in the East Bay city of Concord.
The Concord court opened in 2024 amid a Biden-era push to trim the ballooning immigration case backlog. As of September 2025, nationwide there are 3.75m pending immigration cases, according to data from the EOIR. In San Francisco, there are 120,000, per the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (Trac), a research center at Syracuse University.
Some legal experts doubt the Concord court, where six judges were recently removed, has the capacity to inherit the closed San Francisco court’s caseload. A justice department spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
“With so few judges at the Concord court, we’re going to see a lot of people waiting years and years and years to have their cases heard,” said Milli Atkinson, director of the San Francisco Bar Association’s immigrant legal defense program.
“These delays deeply affect people. They affect people’s ability to have resolution … to have an answer and closure, whether a positive one that they’d hoped for or a negative one,” said Shira Levine, a former judge at the San Francisco immigration court, who is now legal director for the Immigrant Institute of the Bay Area.
The passage of time could also weaken the presentation of a case.
At asylum hearings, people are “presenting a lot of oral testimony from themselves and from witnesses. Over years, testimonial memories can fade,” Levine said. “Even if you submit the written evidence, years later, someone may not be available to testify in support of that evidence.”
The San Francisco court’s closure coupled with the exodus of judges has sown “a lot of chaos”, Atkinson said. There are court dates being pushed back and others being pushed up as a result of recent changes.
Atkinson expects that there several individuals will fall through the cracks of the court system.
“A lot of migrants have unstable addresses or don’t receive their mail,” she said, also adding that notices in English may not be heeded by those who don’t speak or read it.
People could then be placed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s radar if they miss their hearings, Atkinson said.
“If someone gets the wrong date, gets the wrong time, gets the wrong place, doesn’t file something exactly correct … the consequences are in some cases – where they really do have a serious fear of return – life-threatening.”
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