Residents hunkered down, ski resorts closed up shop, and snowplows hustled to clear roads as an enormous snowstorm descended on the Sierra Nevada on Friday, including the Lake Tahoe area, with as much as 12 feet of snow expected at the highest elevations and winds gusting over 100 miles an hour.
The Sierra Avalanche Center warned that the danger of avalanches was high for the Central Sierra. Officials at Yosemite National Park said the park would remain closed through noon on Sunday. Many ski resorts in the region announced that they were closing at least for the day.
The storm system triggered a rare tornado that touched down in Madera, in central California, damaging an elementary school while students were inside on Friday, said Brian Ochs, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Hanford.
As showers and heavy snow continued Friday evening, more than 57,000 California customers had no electricity, according to PowerOutage.us. In Tahoe City, where there were reports of brief power outages, the streets were mostly empty of cars as snow piled up the roadways. One resident, Tristan Queen, said he was planning to head to the grocery store by snowmobile.