Heavy snow and rain lashed California and other parts of the West on Friday as the country’s latest winter storm hit, while thousands in Michigan grappled with extended power outages caused by one of the worst snow storms in decades.
The National Weather Service has warned of a “cold and dangerous winter storm” that will hit California through Saturday. Blizzard warnings were posted in the Sierra Nevada and Southern California mountain ranges, where up to 5 feet (1.5 m) of snow was expected.
According to the regional weather office, “Simply put, this will be a historic event for the amount of snow on the higher peaks and lower elevations.”
Interstate 5, the West Coast’s major north–south highway, was closed south of the Oregon border as snow fell on the Sacramento Valley floor and in a high mountain pass north of Los Angeles, where blizzard warnings were in effect. Was. Minor roads also remained closed.
Forecasters warned of strong gale force that could produce watersheds off the Southern California coast. Blizzard warnings are in effect for parts of Nevada.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, hundreds of people went up 2,500-foot (760 m) Mount Tamalpais to play in the snow. Julian Skerrett, 19, of Corte Madera, got there early.
“It looks like we’re almost at Tahoe,” he said as flakes continued to fall. “It’s like a powder day, lots of fluffy snow.”
In other hurricane-hit parts of the country, however, most of the beauty was lost. The weather has closed major roads, caused traffic jams, closed schools and halted air travel. According to FlightAware.com, as of Friday afternoon, more than 300 flights were canceled and more than 3,000 were delayed.
Much of Portland, Oregon, remained closed on Friday and icy roads were not expected to melt until Saturday, with the city recording its second heaviest snowfall this week — nearly 11 inches.
All told, the storm blackened nearly one million homes and businesses from coast to coast. Michigan was hardest hit this week after a storm left branches, power lines and utility poles coated with snow up to three-quarters of an inch thick, leaving more than 820,000 customers in the dark at one point.
By Friday, that had dropped to less than 700,000 in the populous southeastern corner of the state around Detroit. Promises of power restoration by Sunday, when the low temperature was expected to climb above zero again (minus 18 degrees Celsius), were of little consolation.
“It’s really vague and it’s really long,” said Apoorva Gokhale of Walled Lake, Michigan. “There are four days without electricity in such weather. This is unimaginable.
In the early hours of Thursday, the electricity of his house went off. By that evening, the temperature inside had dropped to 55 degrees (12 Celsius). She, her husband and son stayed the night with relatives.
Tom Rankin, 70, said he and his wife were unable to reach his 100-year-old mother-in-law on the phone Friday morning. The couple went to her home in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, Rankin said, finding her on a bed “with lots of blankets.”
She was fine, Rankin said, and the temperature in her house was about 65 degrees after the power outage Thursday afternoon. But they helped him to his car, planning to ride the outage to another relative’s house.
A Michigan firefighter died Wednesday after coming in contact with a power line in Pow, officials said.
“We haven’t had a snowstorm in the last 50 years that affected our infrastructure like this,” said Trevor Lauer, president of DTE Electric.
In Southern California, the latest storm began moving in with rain and snow on Thursday. Flood watches and warnings were in effect as of Saturday afternoon for some coastal areas and basins, and rain was expected to cause flooding and debris flows in some areas that have been burned by wildfires in recent years.
Portions of Interstate 80 were closed in California and Wyoming, including a stretch of about 70 miles (112 km) over the top of the Sierra Nevada connecting California and Nevada.
An evacuation warning was also issued for four areas in Ventura County, which were deemed unstable after being hit hard by the storm last month.
Storms have increased major rainfall from December and January “atmospheric rivers” that have improved California’s drought outlook, but officials who allocate water to farms, cities, and industries are at a more abrupt end to hydrologic conditions in recent history. Be alert for change.
The weather service said temperatures in the area could drop well below normal, posing a particular risk to the homeless.
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Taxin reports from Orange County, California. Contributing to this report were Associated Press reporters Haven Daly in California, Corey Williams in Michigan and Sarah Brumfeld in Washington, D.C., as well as several other AP reporters around the country.