Wow. Hi guys. What a week we’ve had in Healdsburg, to kick off the new year. I hope everyone stayed safe and at least relatively dry on Monday, during the first major floodbath of the 2025-26 wet season. Such a doozy! If you still need to process what happened, don’t worry — you’ll find a comprehensive storm recap in the weather section, a little further down. And here’s what else we’ll cover in today’s community news roundup:

But first, I’d love your help solving one final small-town holiday mystery still lingering in the ether from 2025 (the first being the inexplicable Christmas tree light outage in the plaza). Renae Perry, co-owner of Papapietro Perry Winery out in the Dry Creek Valley, emailed me recently to ask if I knew what happened to the “giant lighted angel” that’s usually installed along Dry Creek Road, a few miles north of the Dry Creek General Store & Bar. “It was there last year,” she says, “around 6000 Dry Creek Road.” Now I’m super curious, too! Let me know if anyone out there has any answers, or even just clues to share… 🧐

I’d also love your continued support as I build this newsletter into a sustainable local resource — one that can stay afloat through thick and thin. Here’s how to help make sure it never goes away:

So we just survived another whopper of a weeklong storm, as I’m sure you noticed. This one brought anywhere from 5-10 inches of rainfall to Healdsburg and the surrounding area, depending on which local rain gauge you’ve been checking. The rain started slow last Wednesday, on New Year’s Eve, and built in intensity over the weekend, especially during the nighttime hours. Down in Marin County, all this sky water converged with some potentially historic “king tides” — caused by extra “gravitational pull between sun, moon and Earth” — to completely inundate waterside towns like Sausalito and Mill Valley last weekend. Aerial TV news footage showed multiple feet of water infiltrating local shops and homes and roadways — even certain stretches of the 101 freeway. Many locals said they’ve never seen the water that high in the area before.

And then by Monday, thanks to deluge upon deluge of unrelenting rain — up to a few inches’ worth within a 24-hour period — it was our turn for some big storm chaos here in Sonoma County. Healdsburg city officials announced just after 3pm Monday that the following roads were closed due to flooding: “Grove Street in multiple locations between Matheson Street and Grant Street, Larkspur Drive Terrace at Healdsburg Avenue, Bridle Path [in Parkland Farms], Moore Lane and West North.” The Healdsburg Tribune posted a crazy photo of the water creeping up City Hall steps on Grove Street, after Foss Creek hopped its banks nearby. And neighbors reported even more intense flooding along Kinley Drive on the west side of town; see photos below. FYI, Kinley was still closed as of this afternoon, along with Alexander Valley Road to our northeast. The county’s public infrastructure agency also said there was some erosion during the storm on newly repaired stretches of North Fitch Mountain and Westside roads — but “our crews have been on site and have confirmed that there are no structural concerns with the newly built retaining walls,” county officials said. (“The issues are limited to surface-level erosion control,” they explained, “not the integrity of the infrastructure itself.”) So those problem spots seem to be holding for now…

Things got even more dicey in the towns just downriver of Healdsburg on Monday and Tuesday, as they usually do in storms like these. At least a dozen roads were flooded and closed in the western Windsor and Forestville and Guerneville area — although I haven’t heard about any deaths or close calls due to people stuck in their cars this time, thank heavens. That said, the damage was hefty. At one point, a chunk of Highway 116 near Monte Rio fell through and crumbled down the riverbank; it could take a full year to repair, according to the Press Democrat. And Tuesday morning, at the height of the post-rain flooding, a wastewater treatment plant overflowed in Guerneville, sending raw sewage straight into raging river waters. “The public is advised to avoid the Russian River downstream of the treatment plant to Jenner,” the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office wrote in a public alert sent out yesterday morning. “Russian River beaches are closed, as are Sonoma Coast beaches from Russian Gulch State Beach south to Doran Beach, due to health hazards.” And the PD followed up this afternoon: “Beaches were closed Wednesday along the Sonoma County coast and warnings were posted urging people to keep out of the water as untreated wastewater continued to spill into the Russian River from a sewage treatment plant in Guerneville. The spill… has yet to be contained, prompting an urgent response by county health and water officials.”

So nasty! But at least the Russian River itself didn’t simultaneously flood in Guerneville, which I suppose might have sent raw sewage into homes and businesses; instead, the river got within around a foot-and-a-half of the flood point, according to the government’s official waterline monitoring website. “We dodged a bullet,” local Realtor David Miller said in a Facebook video dispatch yesterday from the Guerneville Bridge. Other nearby residents expressed their relief on Nextdoor as well. Here in Healdsburg, the Russian River didn’t flood either: That same website showed it hit a high of 17 feet on Tuesday morning at the measuring spot near Camp Rose, a few feet below the point where everyone starts to get worried. And at the small grassy park along our western riverbank between Memorial Bridge and the old train bridge — where “Healdsburg longtimers are accustomed to checking the river level,” to quote a recent Facebook post from the City of Healdsburg — that one little park bench was still sticking out of the water as the river peaked, which is always a good sign. (Photo evidence below!) Another “benchmark,” per se, is the concrete river platform near Badger Park, whose lore we explored in the last newsletter. That, too, was still sticking out of the water Tuesday morning… so all the nearby river dwellers knew they would be all right. 💙

And now, after all that… feel free to de-tarp and air out your musty yard piles, people, cause the forecasters say we’ve got at least a week or two (and maybe more) of dry weather ahead! Without a storm cover to insulate us, though, it’ll be much colder than before, the SF Chronicle reports — even brushing up against the freeze point over the next few nights. In fact, the National Weather Service (NWS) went so far as to issue an “extreme cold watch” for our area this Friday morning, from 1-9am. Here’s the full NWS forecast for the week to come: