At Donner Summit, scientists on the Central Sierra Snow Lab on the University of California, Berkeley, on Saturday reported greater than two feet of snowfall in lower than 36 hours , and state transportation officials were turning big rigs around amid deteriorating road conditions. At 7 a.m., greater than 30 semi trucks were parked in a single file along the shoulder of eastbound Interstate 80 on the Nevada state line.
Rain and Floods in California
For weeks, a string of major storms have hit California, causing extreme flooding and damage across the state.
State, federal and native officials implored motorists to remain off roads that were already stuffed with determined travelers certain for the slopes on a packed Martin Luther King Day weekend.
“In case you can avoid travel, please consider staying home,” Mike Keever, the chief deputy director of the state transportation agency, Caltrans, said at a news conference on Friday. “Watch some football. Enjoy a while together with your family.”
But on Olympic Valley Road, on the crest of the Sierra Nevada, a slow-moving traffic jam inched forward in thick snow toward Palisades Tahoe, a ski resort near Lake Tahoe where, by 6 a.m., nearly a foot of latest snow had fallen.
Andrew Feldmeth, 24, an engineer from San Francisco, said the three- or four-hour drive from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe took him nine hours as white-out visibility stopped traffic for hours on Friday night.
“People were spinning out like crazy,” Mr. Feldmeth said, adding that it was 11 p.m. by the point he pulled into his ski lease on Lake Tahoe’s West Shore. “We were high-quality, it was just the opposite people you don’t learn about.”
In Santa Clara County, where a light-weight rain fell on the Saturday NFL playoff game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Seattle Seahawks, crowds at Levi’s Stadium were undiminished. Two days before, the 49ers tight end George Kittle had publicly expressed his impatience with power outages which have stretched for days in some parts of Northern California.