In Southern California, a few mountain communities are still digging out from a snowstorm that blanketed the area with historic amounts of snow in late February—more than 100 inches in some places—and left some people stranded in their homes for more than two weeks. Throughout the San Bernardino Mountains, streets went unplowed and residents were injured by collapsed roofs and gas explosions—others have suffered without power, heat, or access to medicines. As of Monday, at least 13 people have died—some as a direct result of the weather—and the Los Angeles Times reported that some residents fear their neighbors may be dead in their homes. Locals have criticized San Bernardino County officials for their lack of preparedness and poor emergency response.
When Slate caught up with 30-year-old Cierra Lavarias of Crestline last week, she had been stuck in her house, which was buried under 6 feet of snow, with her husband and dogs for two weeks. This article is adapted from that conversation.
We’ve been trapped up here since Feb. 22. We knew a couple of days in advance that we were going to get some weather. We knew that it could possibly be several inches above normal. As the storm started coming in, they issued a blizzard warning, which hasn’t happened in our county since 1989. It’s not uncommon for us to get snow in the winter, but this specific weather event was just extremely abnormal in terms of the amount of snowfall that we got. It was back-to-back-to-back storms.
We’re considered an unincorporated city here in San Bernardino County. So we, unlike some other high-elevation mountain communities like Big Bear, rely solely on the county and Caltrans [the California Department of Transportation] to maintain the roads. We don’t really have the same amount of funding other towns do. Some of these higher-elevation communities got the same, if not more snow than we did, and they were up and running within one or two days. Meanwhile, our community has been stuck up here for going on 14 days. That’s the big frustration for most of the residents. The county started holding press conferences and saying that they were contracting with other counties and cities around us to get more equipment, and more plows. But the help didn’t really start coming for quite some time. I’ve heard of some deaths. There’s been power lines that have gone down. People have been without power for weeks on end. They’re cold and they don’t have firewood and it’s just been a terrible, terrible situation.
At the height of the snowstorms, we would sometimes have a few hours of breaks in between storms, so we tried to shovel, shovel, shovel. Then we’d wake up the next morning to it being for nothing—it would just be completely covered back up again. When the end of the last storm hit, we opened our front door, and there was just 6 feet of snow outside of it. We had to literally dig ourselves a trench, like a walkway down the path, and create a little area that our dogs could use to go potty. They’re big dogs, over 70 pounds each. They’ve just been so cooped up and anxious. They’re used to running around—we have a huge yard.
There’s just no way to physically leave without having a shovel and digging yourself a path. And with all the downed power lines everywhere, even if you wanted to walk to a corner store or something, it probably wouldn’t be operating because the people who own the store are in the same boat.
We had two shovels, but one of them broke because of all the digging. Then we only had one shovel, so we were taking turns. I would be outside for a few hours digging, and then we’d switch and my husband would go outside and do it for two hours. For five or six, maybe seven days straight, we were outside for probably six, seven, eight hours just trying to make a pathway to our car, which is also buried in 6 feet of snow.
It’s definitely a total body workout. You use muscles you don’t even know that you have. I definitely never want to look at a snow shovel ever again. The problem is there’s nowhere to put the snow that you’re shoveling, and I think that that’s a big problem for the plows too. People are saying it’s probably not going to melt till June.
We lost power for about five days. It wasn’t a complete loss of power, but a tree had fallen across the street from us and ripped out the connection to a power line. So we only had like five or six outlets that were working at our house. We had to move our refrigerator to plug into a different outlet so that we could keep our food cold. Thankfully, we were able to find an extension cord long enough to run from the furnace in our basement to an outdoor outlet through the window that was working. So we were able to stay warm. But there are people on the street next to or behind us that have been without power for about seven days now and nothing has been done to fix it.
We’ve had our phones and we’ve had internet, so we’ve been keeping in contact with our families. It’s hard when everyone feels so bad. Your family and your friends are like, “What can I do?” And it’s like, “Well, nothing because no one can come up here.”
Just in our neighborhood, there are multiple collapsed homes and small businesses. I’ve heard of many people who are stranded down the mountain and haven’t been able to get back up. They could come back to collapsed homes. Our grocery store collapsed. And it’s the only grocery store in this area. That was extremely scary because we thought, “If we do run out of food, how are we going to get food now that the grocery store’s closed? We can’t walk there.” At that point, there really weren’t any food distribution points. But I think for me, the hardest part was just seeing all of the pleas from the community, feeling like we have been forgotten and neglected here in our little town.
I commute up and down the mountain every day for work, and I haven’t been able to get to work for two weeks now. I had to exhaust all of the PTO that I had. At this point, I’ve been forced to take unpaid days. Because it was declared a state of emergency, people are being urged to apply for disaster unemployment. So that’s something that I was able to do.
I feel like we were prepared. I always try to have enough food and frozen meats and things like that here. And I also stocked up on dog food beforehand. I don’t know that there’s much more that we could have done to prepare. It was just a lot of waiting around and anxiousness, watching a lot of TV, a lot of news. We watched a Netflix show. Some documentaries, things like that. I like the Cooking Channel.
Every time we would see a food commercial or a fast food commercial, we were like, “Oh my gosh, I never wanted a burrito from that place so bad.”
Late last week, Crestline and surrounding towns braced for rain and with it the possibility of flooding and further roof collapses. As of Saturday night, nearly all the highways in the county were reopened to the public, a decision many residents decried as too soon.