Just after Christmas 2022 Cruzio started preparing for rainy weather. The storms started on New Year’s Eve and didn’t let up for weeks. All the photos below were taken by Cruzio staff as we went around our service area assessing damage and making repairs:

The storm began like this. Down in the lower-lying regions, our rivers were looking pretty full. We watched the gauges anxiously. If the river topped the levees in downtown Santa Cruz it would be an all-hands emergency.

This is where Branciforte Creek (below the bridge in the upper right) was emptying vast amounts of muddy brown water to the already-full San Lorenzo River.

 

The river overwhelmed the Benchlands, close to the Santa Cruz County Building.

 

The water came close to the base of the bridge

We were lucky in downtown Santa Cruz, you can see the river was high but it didn’t breach the levee. Other river communities weren’t so lucky:  Felton Grove had a particularly hard time

 

Creeks up north in Half Moon Bay were overflowing, too:

And in the San Lorenzo Valley. This is Felton:

Up in the mountains, falling trees were a huge problem. This is what a Cruzio staffer met with as he tried to get down to our headquarters:

 

And we had similar problems trying to reach our subscribers in the mountains. This is Glenwood Drive:

 

Close up:

 

We saw the aftermath of a lot of devastation:

 

Downed fiber lines affected Cruzio Internet directly:

 

 

It’s hard to send internet through this:

 

Or this fiber optic line getting crushed in San Mateo County:

 

The downed trees made their way to the ocean and built up huge piles:

 

That’s the Santa Cruz Boardwalk being battered by high tide and river outflow simultaneously:

 

In fact the tide meeting the river current created some decent wave action pretty far up the river. People were surfing those waves even past the trestle bridge near the Santa Cruz Boardwalk :

 

Piles and heaps of downed trees and limbs and other flotsam created huge dams. A lot of work for Public Works departments to keep the water flowing:

 

People came out to move the flotsam off the volleyball courts because after all, (volley)Ball is Life:

 

They pushed the fallen trees into big piles by the Coconut Grove:

 

The cliffs aren’t looking too good either. We’ve seen a lot of cracking and splitting in the last few years, and having high waves full of rocks and downed trees smashing against the cliffs doesn’t help. This is a section of cliff right above Steamer Lane — a portion of it crashed into the water days later:

 

Back to the mountains, where fiber splicing crew were spotted fixing some of the downed lines:

 

The beach looked pretty messy and the water seemed dangerous — tree trunks anybody? But surfers were out and about pretty quickly:

 

We’re still seeing toppled trees all over:

 

And can you spot the frisbee golf station?:

 

West Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz was ripped apart:

 

Fencing flung over, cliffsides tumbled down:

 

Lanes closed, probably for many months and after that, who knows?:

 

But there were the surfers:

 

And we hadn’t seen rainbows for a while, but here they were: