San Francisco jolted awake by its first-ever tornado warning

At 5:53 a.m. on Saturday, phones blared across San Francisco with an unusual warning: Tornado.

The National Weather Service issued the warning — which expired just minutes later — writing, “At 551 AM PST, a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado was located near Daly City, moving northeast at 45 mph.”

The fast-moving rotation approaching Ocean Beach prompted the historic alert for the whole city and northern Peninsula.

It was the first tornado warning on record for the area, National Weather Service meteorologist Dalton Behringer told The Standard.

No such alert was issued before a roof-ripping twister tore through South San Francisco and Daly City in 2005, he said, in part because “radar systems were much different back then” — as were emergency systems.

Like the warning for the tsunami that wasn’t earlier this month, Saturday’s tornado alert buzzed and blared on thousands of cellphones.

The message advised people to “TAKE COVER NOW! Move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. Avoid windows and protect yourself from flying debris. If you are outdoors or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris.”

The warning applied to downtown San Francisco and parts of San Mateo County, including Daly City, Brisbane and Colma.

“The storm offshore was showing the rotation signature strong enough that we suspected there could be a water spout or a tornado,” Behringer explained in a phone call. “It was moving over toward the city, so that prompted us to issue the warning.”

But even strong storms have a tough time holding over the city’s uneven landscape, so the threat quickly subsided.

“These storms really thrive off of a steady wind flow,” Behringer said, adding that “as they move over a hilly environment, it gets disrupted and it’s no longer able to keep that intensity.”

At 6:07 a.m., the threat appeared to have passed.

“Tornado threat for the city of San Francisco has ENDED, the storm has moved northeast of downtown,” the National Weather Service wrote on X.

Video shared online hours later show a twister that touched down about 70 miles south in Scotts Valley, however.

Meanwhile, strong winds did some damage across San Francisco.

San Francisco emergency officials said the main impacts involved downed electrical equipment, toppled trees, and power outages.

Thankfully, the storm didn’t directly hurt anyone in San Francisco, city Rec & Park spokesperson Tamara Aparton told The Standard. But she said about 75 to 100 trees were toppled across the city’s park system — about half of them in Golden Gate Park.

“It’s been a very busy day for our arborists, heavy equipment operators, gardeners, and rangers, who started working at 6 a.m.,” she wrote in an email Saturday afternoon. “By far, the west end of Golden Gate Park was the hardest hit.”

Crews have been clearing roadways all day.

“Fortunately, we were well prepared,” Aparton continued. “We closed all of golf courses due to the high winds and stormy weather, as well as Stern Grove, Pine Lake, Twin Peaks, the San Francisco Botanical Gardens, the Japanese Tea Garden and all athletic fields.”

The city also canceled all outdoor games and events because of the dangers of falling trees.

In the city’s parks, at least, the issues seem to be confined to flooding and damage to pavement and fencing. Part of the fencing went down on the outer bison paddock in Golden Gate Park, Aparton said, but the animals were safely confined to their inner paddock.

Across town, in the Mission District, crews had to remove a fallen tree blocking Shotwell Street, where sections of the neighborhood went dark in a predawn outage. Other reports of fallen trees came from throughout the city, including at Lawton Street and the Great Highway, where someone’s car was reportedly stuck under a felled trunk.

From 6 a.m. through late morning, the San Francisco Fire Department said it fielded upward of 100 storm-related calls involving trees, electrical hazards, vehicle collisions, and the like.

Presidio Heights resident Tilly McLain said she was in her house when she heard a crash.

“It sounded like I lost one of my patio plants, so I was more worried for my fuchsia,” she told The Standard. “It wasn’t until the morning that we figured out how big the damage was and what actually came down.”

In the morning light, McLain saw that a huge chunk of stucco had fallen off the side of her building and shattered in her patio. Her fuchsia was unharmed.

Though the storm wasn’t as intense as the early morning warning predicted, rains and strong winds continued to pound the coast, and blackouts reportedly impacted thousands of people throughout the Bay Area.

PG&E said it dispatched crews to respond to outages in San Francisco’s Sunset and Mission districts, as well as in Daly City and Pacifica.

Just before 7 a.m., the company reported that about 40,000 households were without power in San Francisco and parts of the Peninsula.

As of 11 a.m., ABC7’s Power Map showed more than 60 discrete outages across San Francisco, some affecting as many as 800 customers.

Though the San Francisco airport reported just 18 flight cancellations, according to FlightAware, it recorded a wind gust of more than 80 mph.

The winds were strong enough for officials to send an alert about potential disruptions to ferry service to and from Tiburon and Angel Island through at least Saturday afternoon.

Rains and gusts are expected to continue until then, Behringer said, but the rest of the weekend will be “nothing like this morning.”

“We’re just going to be dealing with scattered showers for the rest of the day,” he said. “Some may have lighting.”

Going into the afternoon, San Francisco may even get some sun. And by Sunday, the region is expected to dry out.