Residents begin digging out from Sierra Nevada blizzard
Region receives up to 4 feet of snow in 48 hours with most roads, resorts closed
TAHOE CITY >> Jake Coleman was digging his Ford Escape compact SUV out of the snow that had buried it to the roof on Saturday afternoon. The Palisades Tahoe worker had been toiling for a halfhour and the car was still more than half-covered.
To be fair, Coleman didn't have many places to go.
California's strongest blizzard so far this year dumped 2 to 4 feet of snow across the mountains in a 48-hour period between Thursday and Saturday morning, according to Sara Purdue, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento.
Highway officials closed a 70mile portion of Interstate 80 between Colfax and the CaliforniaNevada state line. Blizzard warnings in place advised against any travel until the storm calmed down this morning.
Many of the region's ski resorts closed their slopes for the weekend. Even Tahoe City's annual Snowfest parade, to take place Saturday, was canceled.
“There was too much snow,” Coleman said.
The storm pummeling the Sierra Nevada since Thursday crescendoed Friday night going into Saturday morning, with wind gusts reaching more than 190 mph in high-elevation areas, and whiteout conditions forcing roads in the Lake Tahoe area to close and ski resorts to shutter.
Around the Tahoe area, as snow piled up on homes, power lines and parked cars, locals were engaged in the Sisyphean task of clearing the flurries even as more fell.
Coleman's neighbor, Janna Gunnels, a 46-year-old Delta flight attendant, was digging out her similarly ensconced Subaru.
She was supposed to be flying out of San Francisco today, but “that's not going to happen,” Gunnels said Saturday as she struggled with the snow.
Jeremy Linder, a spokesperson for Caltrans, couldn't estimate when officials would reopen Interstate 80, the major connection between the Sierra and the Bay Area. The decision came after multiple spinouts along the highway Friday afternoon, Linder said.
Highway officials started to hold traffic about 4:30 p.m., leaving between 200 to 300 vehicles stranded on I-80, according to
Truckee Fire District battalion chief Ryan Ochoa, whose Soda Springs-based crews responded to the scene.
Even with graders, plows and tractors to help them clear snow, emergency personnel and tow trucks struggled for hours to reach motorists, some of whom were forced to abandon their cars on the highway.
“Even tow trucks were getting stuck,” Ochoa said.
He said he was not aware of anyone who needed to be taken to a hospital.
Caltrans also closed highways 20 and 49 in Sierra County, two commonly used alternative routes to reach the Truckee area. Interstate 50 remained open Saturday afternoon, although chain restrictions were in place.
“We are still encouraging motorists not to travel this weekend if they don't have to,” Linder said.
The closure of I-80 caused problems for Nicole Garcia and her colleagues early Saturday morning, even though they did not even need to drive on the highway.
Garcia, 30, a customer service representative from Sacramento, was staying at a hotel in Truckee and left with two colleagues in her all-wheel-drive Jeep early in the morning for an appointment just minutes away in downtown. But more than a foot of snow had fallen overnight and high winds had created drifts several feet high.
“I went over a big old snow pile and got stuck,” Garcia said.
Unable to move the vehicle, she called AAA, but was told the company could not send a service truck from Reno because the highway was shut down. Out came the shovels, Garcia said, and she and her two co-workers dug for an hour to no avail. Finally, she said, another colleague with a truck and a tow strap pulled them out.
In parts of the Donner Lake area, high winds and heavy snow knocked tree branches onto power lines, leading to outages Friday night and Saturday morning for 1,000 customers of the Truckee Donner Public Utility District.
On Highway 89, the few drivers who braved the conditions Saturday encountered regular whiteouts as gusts swept dense, swirling clouds of snow off the white-covered trees beside the roadway. In Truckee and Tahoe City, motorists crept slowly past the many businesses kept closed because of the storm.
Roadway mayhem and other storm-related problems were kept to a minimum by the absence of crowds, Ochoa said. Many would-be visitors heeded well-publicized warnings to avoid travel in the Sierra Nevada because of the blizzard and the closure of I-80 was keeping the Lake Tahoe area quieter Saturday.
“If they decide to open up the freeway and we get a big push of people coming through, that could change things,” Ochoa said.
At his home near the lake in Tahoe City, Eric Bervid was hosting friends from Australia. Bervid gave one friend a shovel and the other a snow blower: novelties for the men from Down Under.
Bervid, a 60-year-old general contractor and third-generation Tahoe resident, described the blizzard as “not that big of a storm, except for the wind.”
Still, he and his friends spent more than three hours clearing snow before they were in a position to chill out in the afternoon — for a while.
“We're going to go to the brewery behind us, then go home and make enchiladas and play board games, and probably shovel some more,” Bervid said.
In Olympic Valley, Janine Shaw, a remote technology worker for eBay in San Jose, woke up Saturday morning with her husband and three kids to snowy roads in their neighborhood.
“The plows didn't come out for quite a while, so we had to put the snow pants and the snowshoes on to take the dog out,” Shaw said.
“It's like a bobsled run,” Shaw said just before noon Saturday. “It's whiteout conditions in some places. They plowed, but it keeps coming down.”
The storm hit its peak overnight Friday, but will continue to pummel the mountains with snow and wind through Monday. A slight break in the snowfall is expected that morning, but a second storm could hit the area by the afternoon, bringing an additional 2 feet of snow, Purdue of the National Weather Service said.