Wacky weather to linger for a couple more days
Hail gathers along Highway 89 in Truckee on July 8. Photo/LTN
By Kathryn Reed
Rumbling, crackling and flashes of white light. It’s just another day in Lake Tahoe. Oh, and there is fresh snow on Tioga Pass.
Hail has been common with this series of storms that is now in its second week. On July 8 golf-ball size hail was recorded in South Lake Tahoe. More typical has been marble-size hail. It has gathered in places to the point it looks like snow.
While summer thunderstorms are not uncommon in the region, they usually don’t hang around this long or come at all hours of the day and night.
“This pattern has been very persistent in that it hasn’t shifted,” Alex Hoon, meteorologist with National Weather Service in Reno told Lake Tahoe News. “A high pressure over the Great Basin brings moisture up from the south.” These are monsoon-like storms.
In the last 36 hours a low pressure has come over California, which is cooling things down.
South Lake Tahoe’s high on Wednesday was 69, while it was 85 in Reno. Normally these two cities are 80 and 91, respectively. Today’s high in the city is slated to be 65 degrees, while it may reach 78 in Reno.
South Lake received 0.39 inches of rain on July 8 and 0.05 inches on July 7. Truckee on Wednesday recorded 0.11 inches. In Little Valley, which on the other side of Diamond Peak between Incline Village and Washoe Lake, the rain total was 0.57 inches.
Douglas County on Wednesday issued a disaster declaration for parts of the valley because of the flooding. The declaration will allow the county to call in additional crews to help clear roads, remove debris and repair public infrastructure that continues to be damaged as repeated storms cause flash flooding.
The most recent flash flood was primarily concentrated in the Stephanie Lane and Johnson Lane areas. Approximately141 homes have been recorded as possibly having water and structural damage and an unknown number of homes with landscape damage, according to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department.
The Johnson Lane Firehouse Station 6 is being used as the local field office for citizens to report damage. Sandbags are available at Fire Station 6 on Stephanie Lane.
While the moisture is welcome in this fourth year of drought, it is wreaking havoc on traditional summer businesses in Tahoe. Ski resort gondolas and trams can’t run when there is even a threat of lightning, and boat-paddle-bike rentals come to a grinding halt.
Thunderstorms are still in the forecast and remain so through the weekend, though with a diminishing chance.
By next week the weather is expected to return to normal – dry, a little breezy and in the 80s at the lake.
Go and observe the high country (above 9000 feet) dried out sandy meadows that look like small dried lake beds. You will see a ring of dead or almost dead lodgepole pines around the edges. Weather cycles. The wet summer has returned. Alaska is burning. Alaska burned even bigger in 2004. Put away the panic buttons. Business as usual.
These storms are AWESOME! I love walking in the woods and meadows right after the gullywashers…everything sparkling and colors and scents so rich. All them mashed mosquito’s NOT biting me.
Hope it stays through August.
@Bluewire….I hope you’re right…we’ll see. One spate of thunderstorms does not a climate shift make.
Please no rain or lightening for the Death Ride this weekend!
One reason among many to love the mountains is that they are always unpredictable, and always interesting.
Discovering mountains as a kid of 12 (who had been raised in the flats of the mid west until then) was the best thing I believe could have happened to me.
Lisa…Hope you and all involved are kept safe during the ride…
Well it IS called the death ride no?
I’m liking this weather and so do the wildflowers and vegetables, as they really respond to rainwater.
I had a lightning bolt real close overhead the other afternoon in the backyard. Got indoors real quick! A little too close for comfort.
Let’s hope for more rain and t-storms that don’t start fires. We need all the moisture we can get. OLS