Second round of snow shuts down desert

BARSTOW • For the second time in a week, snow covered the Barstow area Wednesday, closing multiple travel routes and leaving many civilian workers stranded at Fort Irwin for the night.

To some people, like Laurie Jameson, who was out shopping at Wal-Mart Wednesday afternoon, the snow was a treat.

“I’m excited,” she said. “I love it. It’s as good as Big Bear.”

For others, like Katherine Moreland, a U.S. Postal Service worker from Los Angeles, it was an ordeal. Moreland and her son Marcus Shelton, a first-year student at Cerritos College, got stranded at Barstow Station when their bus from Las Vegas was turned back by a weather-related Interstate 15 closure between Barstow and Victorville.

The mother and son were coming back from visiting family in Las Vegas when they got stuck in Barstow, meaning that Shelton missed a final exam and Moreland will likely miss work Thursday. They planned to get a hotel room for the night and catch the first bus out in the morning.

“This is not what I intended to run into,” Moreland said.

During the course of the day Wednesday, the weather caused multiple closures on Interstate 15 between Cajon Pass and the Nevada state line. As of 5 p.m., CalTrans reported that the interstate was closed from Interstate 215 all the way to Primm, Nev.

State Route 247, which turns into Barstow Road, was closed south of Veterans Parkway throughout the day.

Fort Irwin Road, the only route from Barstow to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, was closed from about 7:30 a.m. to 3:45 p.m., when it reopened with California Highway Patrol escorts to allow civilian workers to get back to town, Barstow area CHP Officer Taj Johnson said.

The road closed again shortly before 6 p.m.

“We had cars sliding everywhere,” Johnson said of the road conditions Wednesday morning. “Tow trucks couldn’t even get to some of them.”

Fort Irwin spokesman John Wagstaffe said the post made plans Wednesday, as it did on Monday, to house civilian workers and others who might be stuck there overnight, including Desert Dispatch reporter Eunice Lee, who was on post covering the planned — then delayed — deployment of soldiers to Iraq when the road closure was announced.

Wagstaffe said the post had planned to house approximately 2,000 people in gymnasiums and offices. He was unsure how many of those workers had made it off the post during the two-hour interlude while Fort Irwin Road was open in the afternoon.

The road coming back from the post was stalled with bumper-to-bumper traffic going through Jackhammer Gap during that time, as thousands of workers tried to get home, Johnson said.

The snow came from a cold low pressure system that moved down from the Pacific Northwest and initially hit Southern California on Monday, said National Weather Service meteorologist Andrew Gorelow in the NWS Las Vegas office. The NWS showed a reported two to three inches of snow accumulation about two miles north of Barstow on Monday, Gorelow said.

Meteorologist Barry Pierce said Wednesday afternoon that the snow was expected to continue through midnight that night, tapering off in the early hours of Thursday morning. By late Thursday morning, the weather system was expected to head east, and Barstow should not see any more snow in the later part of the week, he said.

Pierce did not yet have a report of how much snow had accumulated in Barstow on Wednesday.

San Bernardino County Department of Public Works spokeswoman Roni Edis said that road crews have been at work 24 hours a day since Sunday. The county’s Barstow area public works yard houses 12 pieces of equipment, including graders, trucks and snow plows, and has a staff of 16, she said.

Barstow Unified School District and Silver Valley School District remained open as scheduled Wednesday, while Barstow Community College closed at 1:30 p.m. About 215 Silver Valley High School students who live at Fort Irwin got a CHP escort back to the post after school let out, Principal Heather Griggs said. All schools in the Barstow and Silver Valley districts will be closed Thursday.

Because of the Fort Irwin Road closure, the 12th Annual Foot March to the Veteran’s Home of California, which already had to be postponed once due to snow on Monday, has been postponed again. Fort Irwin’s 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment was scheduled to arrive at the veterans home between 10:30 and 11 a.m., but they were unable to make the trip due to the road conditions.

The march will be rescheduled for a yet-to-be-determined date in January, said Denise Phillips, health and safety officer at the home.

Contact the writer:
(760) 256-4123 or asewell@desertdispatch.com