Rains bring water to Mojave River, some lose power

BARSTOW — The bingo faithful at the Knights of Columbus did not let a power outage disrupt their game.

When the lights went out at the civic organization’s weekly bingo game, Eddie Garcia said players scrounged around for candles and flashlights to finish the game.

“We ended up playing by candlelight. People wanted their money,” Garcia, who held a flashlight for one lucky winner, said. “It was the most unusual situation.”

The Knights of Columbus was just one of the 2,220 Southern California Edison customers who temporarily lost power Sunday night when a lightning strike caught a bird’s nest on fire, said Lois Pitter Bruce, a spokeswoman for the electric company. She said the nest was on a pole somewhere south of Pipeline Road and east of Barstow Road in the unincorporated desert. The pole carried two circuits and supplied power to Barstow and Daggett.

“It was sort of a domino effect,” Pitter Bruce said of the outage.

Most customers regained power later that evening and everyone was back online by just after midnight. Fort Irwin also lost power for brief moments on Sunday due to lightning, Pitter Bruce said.

As a result of the weekend weather, and the rain the Barstow area got on Thursday evening, the Mojave River flowed near the Harvey House on Sunday. People took advantage of the water, whether driving off-road vehicles through or admiring it from dry ground.

Water, and wind, also tore through the Barstow golf course west of town on National Trails Highway. Jim Harris, who lives out at the course, said around 25 or 30 trees that were being prepared for transplanting where thrown across the fairways by wind and rain. He said some of the trees were 30 to 40 feet long.

Calico Ghost Town, which suffered damage during Thursday’s storm and closed for the weekend, did not open on Monday as park officials planned. According to an automatic phone message from the county park, the historic mining town expects to open on Thursday.

Jim Harrison, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service Station in Las Vegas, said the rain over the weekend caused several minor flash floods and road closures in the Barstow area. While rain gauges at the Barstow-Daggett Airport stayed dry on Saturday and Sunday, Harrison estimated some of the showers dropped more than a half inch of rain. He said spotty showers are typical of desert storms.

There is a slight chance of more storms on Tuesday, Harrison said, but Barstow should stay hot and dry through the end of the week.

Sticky weather

The weekend rains not only left Barstow wet but also humid. Jim Harrison, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Las Vegas station said minimum humidity figures reached 25 to 30 percent. Normal humidity readings, Harrison said, never jump out of the single digit range.

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