Sierra-Nevada Blizzard

All the news here the last couple of days has been about the blizzard here in the Sierra's. By the end of this storm, which isn't expected until Monday and it started yesterday, there is anticipated to be 10 feet of snow in the mountains. It blew into Reno yesterday and started with torrential rains. It rained, and rained, and rained, and rained, all day. When night came the rain turned into snow. At one point it was snowing so hard that it looked like it was snowing snowballs!

The city is a mess. There were parts of Reno and Sparks that had a lot of flooding due to the rain, and then of course it all froze. About 20 miles east of here, in a small town called Fernley, a levee broke flooding about 800 homes. It happened at 4:30 in the morning, and 4,000 people made it to their rooftops in ice cold water and no power to wait to be plucked off by helicopter and taken to an evacuation center.

Here is the news story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080105/ap_on_re_us/canal_break

I can't imagine trying to fumble through the dark in the middle of the night, in ice cold water that is 4+ feet high in my home, trying to scoop up children, pets, and belongings and try to make it onto my roof in the hopes that someone will come. How scary.

On a positive note, our house is just fine. Ironically we live in a wetlands area where our HOA pumps out water from the neighborhood and dumps it into the designated wetland. Everyone thought the builders were crazy when they started building subdivisions here in the wetlands/swamps. Funny that we have been completely fine here. In fact we only received about an inch of snow overnight. It is very icy due to all of the rain that froze, but other than that we are fine, thankfully! There is supposed to be more snow today, tomorrow, and Monday though, so we will see what we ultimately wind up with.

The wind has been the other huge factor here. We have had 50-80 MPH winds here in the valley, and there has been 100 MPH+ winds in the mountains and Tahoe area.

I forgot one other thing. We are dog sitting for a lady that we go to church with, Annie. She has taken Marley for us a couple of times, so it is now our turn to return the favor. So we have added a toy poodle and a greyhound to our motley crew. Well, it was raining so hard yesterday that dogs refused to go outside. They were pacing and whining all day because they all had to go to the bathroom, but wouldn't go out in the torrential rain.

Annie was supposed to be home last night to pick up the dogs, but they were driving home from San Diego and got caught in the storm. I-80 was closed over Donner's and just about every other road in and out of Reno as well, so we aren't totally sure when they will be making it home. We may have all of these dogs for quite a while! Good thing they are not high strung dogs, we like them a lot.

I will update more as the storm continues, but for now we are warm, safe, and not really much to talk about at all as far as where our house is located!