POLLOCK PINES, Calif. — A powerful winter storm turned dangerous and chaotic this past weekend in the Foothills. It took more than eight hours for people to get from Placerville to Tahoe, so many stalled drivers stopped in smaller towns.
Pollock Pines, where Kim McCarthy owns a business, was one of those communities.
“It was getting quite scary out there,” she told ABC10 Thursday.
Kim and Jim McCarthy put the "Mom & Pop" in their Pollock Pines restaurant, 50 Grand Restaurant and Bar.
"We've just taken over the restaurant in November. We're new owners,” Kim said.
The restaurant was suffering last week from a one-two punch of storms and power outages.
"Because of the power outages, we had already had food loss and were low on food anyway,” she said. “Our delivery services couldn’t come, you know, over the last week because of the snow being bad, and so everything was just low for what we had.”
The couple had to throw away more than $3,000 in food, due to the power outages.
Then came the perfect storm.
President's Day weekend had people heading to the snow. Mother Nature stopped travelers in their tracks on US Highway 50, and cell phone GPS re-routed many of them into the heart of little Pollock Pines.
"There were more cars here than there are people in this town,” Kim said.
Tempers flared as gridlock mounted.
"The guy kept on honking, and the guy in the front said, 'Stop honking, I can't go anywhere,'” Jim recounted. “Then he got out and punched the guy."
Stores and restaurants in Pollock Pines, running out of food and low on employees, many of whom were snowed in at home, did what they could.
50 Grand has a normal serving pace of about eight diners per 20 minutes, the McCarthys said. At its peak on Friday, Feb. 15, however, the restaurant served 150 people in 2 hours—more than three times its normal rate!
Jim says his staff, already depleted by half due to the snow acted, “with class and kindness."
Pony Express Trail, the main drag through town, became like a parking lot, as drivers could neither get onto eastbound US Highway 50, where traffic was at a dead stop nor take detours to avoid the gridlock.
“They’re like, ‘Well, Siri told me I could go this way. I think I’m going to go down that side road,’” Kim recalled, having to tell drivers that “all of these roads are barely plowed properly…[they] were all either dead ends or roads that led them right back to this bottleneck.”
The McCarthys welcome visitors, of course, but they say in this instance— they wish people had heard Caltrans' and other agencies' warnings to avoid the area.
"People were desperate to get to where they wanted to go,” Kim said. “They didn't want to lose their deposits. They didn't want to miss out on their four-day vacation."
A Caltrans spokesperson told ABC10 that the department uses highway message boards for information about chain controls - but not about drive time to Tahoe. Road closures are shared on Caltrans’ social media accounts and the QuickMap app and website.
The spokesman said Caltrans is going to explore how messaging can be improved – but part of the issue was simply poor timing.
“This being traditionally the last holiday weekend (of winter), there was just a lot of traffic that we have,” he said.
Kim thinks people heading to Tahoe need to be more aware of the road conditions between their home and destination.
"There was not an understanding, truly, of what was going on, and so everybody just kept coming," she said. "There really needed to be signs in Benicia or the Richmond Bridge, saying, '12 hours to Tahoe from here,' or, '20 hours to Tahoe from here.'"
The Caltrans spokesperson said the Foothills and Bay Area are in two separate districts, so coordinating message boards between the two would take some extra work.
Travelers who tried coming up to Tahoe this past weekend hit a dead-end that frustrated tourists and locals alike.
“We want people coming up. We just want them to be safe,” Kim said. “Losing the night reservation isn’t that big of a deal when your family’s safety is at heart.”
Continue the conversation with Becca on Facebook.
________________________________________________________________
A Placer County woman is lucky to be alive after spending nearly 24 hours lost in the snow in the Gold Run area. If it wasn’t for her SPOT satellite messenger device, the woman might not have made it out alive.