By the time Nav Singh reached Inverness on Saturday, three feet of brackish water had already inundated the market she owns with her husband, Raj. The rain had finally relented and the clouds were beginning to break as a gaggle of residents in raincoats emerged, mingling with disaster tourists drawn by the spectacle of 20-foot waves and a downtown submerged beneath the tide.
From the front porch of the post office—now a peninsula besieged on three sides by water—Ms. Singh surveyed the scene as she came to terms with the damage: inventory and equipment drowned by the salty surge, no insurance to cover the loss.
“I eat, breath, and sleep this job. It gives me purpose,” she said. “When you see all the muck everywhere, it just hurts.”
Ms. Singh estimates the store lost between $40,000 and $50,000 in merchandise, along with well over $100,000 in flooring and refrigeration. The day before the storm, they had received a large delivery of perishables and, earlier this year, the couple had invested in a new refrigeration system.
The atmospheric river unleashed its fury on Friday night, leaving a trail of destruction across West Marin. Between Wednesday and Sunday, the coast was drenched with five to six inches of rain. Combined with Saturday’s 6.6-foot king tide, the highest of the season, the storm system delivered a devastating one-two punch to low-lying homes and businesses along Tomales Bay.
A king tide occurs when a perfect alignment of the moon, sun and Earth amplifies their combined gravitational pulls, elevating water levels by about two feet above normal high tides. Pair that with gale-force winds and heavy rains, and the results can be catastrophic.
Beaches disappeared under roiling Pacific waters. Winds gusting up to 70 miles per hour uprooted trees and toppled power lines. Powerful waves pummeled the coastline, submerging roads and destroying docks.
Along Tomales Bay’s west shore, nearly every dock was damaged or destroyed. As high tide crested just after 10 a.m., waves rushed in from the east, pummeling the marina at the Tomales Bay Resort. The docks were lifted off their pilings and sent adrift, while stunned employees remarked that they had never seen tides so high.
The east shore fared no better. Docks, decks, boats and lumber were blown into the bay and carried off by the tidal surge. Marshall resident George Clyde described the storm as unusually severe, with “an exceptionally strong west wind that blew directly into the east shore homes and businesses.”
Charlie Egan could only watch as wind and waves twisted his Marshall dock as though it were rubber. A 10-by-12-foot section eventually broke loose, floated briefly into a neighbor’s dock, and coasted a quarter mile north before coming to rest against the Marshall Tavern.
At the nearby boatworks, owner Jeremy Fisher-Smith said that for the first time in 25 years, water breached his workshop. “It was one of those storms that got in a little deeper than most,” he said. He is spending the week cleaning up storm debris. “It’s like rats,” he said. “This storm created a giant compost pile I now have to clean up.”
More than 31,000 PG&E customers across the Bay Area lost power Saturday morning, and West Marin was hit particularly hard. Some remained without electricity until Sunday night; for others, the blackout lasted until Monday afternoon.
“Point Reyes was one of the worst-hit areas,” said Steven Torrence, Marin County’s emergency management director. He said county dispatch received more than 300 storm-related calls, while the public works department and the county flood control district responded to an additional 600 incidents across Marin.
Whipped by wind and weakened at the roots by rain and flooding, trees tall and short, ancient and young toppled across West Marin in significant numbers.
Around 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, Ilie Watterson was downstairs in her home on Laurel Street in Inverness Park when a powerful gust swept through the neighborhood. Almost at once, she heard the ominous creaking and snapping of Douglas firs in the lot next door. She shouted to her children, who were on the top floor, to hurry downstairs, just as three trees crashed onto her front lawn, taking out an oak and a bay tree. Three more flattened a chicken coop, a goat shed and a deck in the backyard.
It was like a freight train came rumbling through, her neighbor remarked.
“Luckily it didn’t hit the actual house, and everybody was fine,” Ms. Watterson said, “but it was a very intense three minutes.” The goats survived, but one chicken, Mohawk, was not as lucky.
Meanwhile, in the seashore, sometime between 9 and 10 a.m., a large pine toppled across the road at the top of Ottinger’s Hill, trapping a few dozen cars on the west side of the barricade until PG&E crews arrived hours later to declare the area safe for clearing.
According to park spokesman Earl Perez-Foust, widespread structural damage has taken priority over restoring trails as the park sets about the task of triaging cleanup.
For some of West Marin’s old-timers, the storm evoked memories of the 1982 deluge, which dumped a foot of rain in just a few hours, triggering landslides that destroyed 100 homes and flooding 2,000 more. For Ms. Singh, it brought memories of a more recent disaster: New Year’s Eve of 2005, just six weeks after her daughter was born. Back then, the market suffered similar devastation, with broken refrigerators and ruined inventory.
“It’s very traumatic, going through a flood,” Ms. Singh reflected. “I didn’t even realize I was depressed at the time. You’re just trying to fix everything. Your kids are young, you have a big mortgage, and you keep pushing forward until you break. I just kept going and going, and then I had to break down.”
FEMA loans were the family’s lifeline then, and she expects they will need to turn to them again. But to be eligible for federal disaster relief, Marin would need to be declared a federally-designated disaster area—a designation it received after the winter storms of 2006, when businesses secured $1.5 million in assistance.
So far, “this storm does not look like we would get close to [FEMA] assistance,” Mr. Torrence said, adding that the county was still reviewing the situation. “Typically, there would need to be significant damage to properties throughout the entire county.”
Marin last declared a state of emergency in January 2023 after storms caused widespread damage. Such declarations enable the county to apply for state and even federal assistance to cover infrastructure repairs and related expenses. They also open the door to low-interest loans and other forms of aid to help residents and businesses recover from private infrastructure damage.