GILROY
– Heavy rain showers and brisk winds will rip through the Gilroy
area starting at midnight today and continue into the early morning
hours of Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.
GILROY – Heavy rain showers and brisk winds will rip through the Gilroy area starting at midnight today and continue into the early morning hours of Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.
“The showers in Gilroy will be heavy, and you should see typical street flooding in low-lying areas,” said Scott Kennedy, a forecaster for the NWS in Monterey. “Of course, the hills and mountains will have it worse.”
Kennedy predicts that between a half inch and 1 inch of rain will fall on Gilroy between today and Sunday, the brunt of it coming in the next 24 hours. With the heavy rain subsiding by mid-morning Saturday, a light drizzle should continue off and on throughout the weekend, Kennedy said.
Wind gusts in Gilroy are expected to measure between 15 and 20 mph, and could reach up to 40 mph in the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west of town, according to the NWS.
Temperatures will hover in the low 60s through Sunday, Kennedy said.
This will be South County’s first major storm since early January; only a wet December ensured that rainfall totals are near normal for the season, according to the NWS.
But for some local farmers the wet relief is too late.
“We always need rain, but it doesn’t help too much at this time of year,” said Jeannie Lopez, a manager of Uesugi Farms, 1100 Highway 25. Lopez said the farm’s strawberries do not take kindly to the rain, and the planting of its peppers could be delayed by the weekend rain.
Kennedy said South County should dodge the worst of the storm.
“Gilroy will get some good moisture out of this storm,” Kennedy said. “But (the storm) should be much less severe there than in cities to the north.”
