SAN FRANCISCO — Northern California spent Saturday drying out and sweeping up after a storm lashed the region.

The respite will be brief. A second storm is expected to hit Sunday, said Holly Osborne with the National Weather Service in Sacramento.

In the Sierra Nevada mountains that span California and Nevada, strong winds caused multiple car crashes involving eight vehicles Friday.

The wind snapped massive trees, closed ski resorts around Lake Tahoe and knocked out power to nearly 5,000 people near Reno.

San Francisco International Airport saw delays of up to 90 minutes and about 175 flights were canceled Friday.

As of 11:00 am on Saturday local time more then 43,000 people were still without power due to the storm, most in the far north of California, said Pacific Gas and Electric spokesman Matt Nauman.

"We started out with 262,300 customers impacted," he said.

PG&E is now gearing up for storm number two. "We've got 2,200 personnel responding," he said.

Despite a second storm coming, the wet weather won't "even put a dent" in the historic drought that is one of the most severe in the history of the state, Osborne said.

Friday's storm brought between 7 and 9 inches of rain along California's northern coast, which tapered to just an inch or so in the heavily agricultural Central Valley, the National Weather Service reported.

The storm was a fabled "Pineapple Express," an atmospheric river of moisture carried over the ocean from near Hawaii on air currents and then dumped along the West Coast, beginning in Washington state, Osborne said.

Storms there caused flooding in several areas on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, swamping parts of the town of Brinnon when the Duckabush River overflowed its banks.

In California, the water was welcome after six weeks of almost no precipitation during what should have been wet winter months. The normal rhythm of the region is that winter storms build up the snowpack, which then melts in the spring, providing needed water throughout the summer.

Instead, January was almost bone-dry. San Francisco had its first January with no rain whatsoever since record-keeping began during the California Gold Rush in the 1840s, according to the weather service.

The storm expected for Sunday will bring at best another 4 inches of rain.

"That will help," she said. "We'll see some increases in our reservoirs, but nothing drastic."