UPDATES: Bay Area Christmas storm brings downed trees, power outages, road closures

Heavy rains and strong winds from powerful winter storms this week brought the wettest Christmas season to Southern California in years, triggering widespread mudslides and debris flows and leaving homes halfway filled with mud.

A falling tree killed a San Diego man Wednesday, news outlets reported. Farther north, a Sacramento sheriff's deputy died in what appeared to be a weather-related crash.

A 70-year-old woman was killed in Mendocino, California Monday after being swept away by a large wave and a 74-year-old man was killed in Redding, California after being swept away by flood waters Sunday.

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The Lick Observatory in San Jose was badly damaged by wind gusts that eclipsed 100 miles per hour, much stronger than the team there expected.

The Lick Observatory in San Jose was badly damaged by wind gusts that eclipsed 100 miles per hour, much stronger than the team there expected. They were strong enough to rip off a three-ton cast iron shutter on the domed building just after 3 a.m.

The visitor building sustained serious damage. Support beams for the roof nearly snapped in half and the building is now red-tagged. As for the nearly 150-year-old refractor telescope, it was thankfully undamaged and now wrapped up. The timeline to reopen and rebuild could be upwards of nine months, according to the Director of University of California Observatories Bruce McIntosh.

"This was probably the worst damage that has ever happened to the telescope," McIntosh said. "It's just heartbreaking, it's an amazingly beautiful place. I'm responsible for all the telescopes that the UC has and the science flagship in Hawaii. This is the most beautiful one. It is an amazing space with wood inlays, it's like a cathedral."

Power is slowly coming back on for thousands of people across the Bay Area, as storms continue to move through.

PG&E told ABC7 News Friday morning that it will have some challenges with restoration in some of the hard hit areas like Santa Cruz County, but says that that work will be made a bit easier now that worst of the storms are behind us.

But it was a challenge for many living in the South Bay.

PG&E reported an outage on San Thomas Aquino Parkway around 7:40 p.m. and at 9:30, people were still without power.

ABC7 News captured video of another outage in Cupertino, where there were reports of downed power lines.

At one point, over 1,000 people were affected.

In downtown San Jose, it was a wet commute.

We found hundreds of families with umbrellas in hands, braving the rain at Christmas In the Park.

From humans to pets, those who were out were dressed for the weather and festivities.

Heading into this round of storms, PG&E said that more than 5,500 field crews were ready to respond to outages.

Waymo has resumed service in San Francisco after taking a brief pause during Thursday's storm in the city.

The power outage last weekend led to Waymo vehicles getting stuck at intersection, creating gridlock on the streets.

Waymo is promising to update the software to better handle these situations.