“There’s a high likelihood that people will be stranded if they try to drive up here from the Bay Area,” said Craig Shoemaker, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento, on Thursday afternoon. “It’s too late to even try. It’s a very dangerous, life-threatening situation that will be developing.”

At local stores in Lake Tahoe, people bought tire chains, snow blowers, shovels, flashlights, candles, battery-powered lanterns and telescoping roof rakes for pulling down accumulated snow on homes.

“Today most of the locals are saying, “There is something big going on,” and yesterday they were saying, “Are we really going to get 10 feet of snow?” said Brittney McClain, manager of Ace Hardware in South Lake Tahoe.

The National Weather Service issued a blizzard warning for the Northern and Central Sierra continuing through 10 a.m. Saturday, the first such warning since Feb. 27 last year.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Avalanche Center in Truckee issued a backcountry avalanche watch in effect from 7 a.m. Friday to 5 p.m. Sunday for the Central Sierra, including the Lake Tahoe area, warning of “extremely dangerous” avalanche conditions.

Because of high winds and declining visibility, ski resorts were expected to close or severely limit operations this weekend.

Sierra-at-Tahoe closed Thursday and announced it also would be shuttered on Friday “to preserve the safety of our guests and employees.” Heavenly closed Thursday afternoon, and other resorts, such as Kirkwood and Palisades, had only a few chair lifts running Thursday, with most closed due to high winds.

Last winter, a series of massive atmospheric river storms dumped dozens of feet of snow on the Sierra Nevada, ending a three-year drought. The Sierra snowpack, which provides about 30% of California’s water supply, was at its deepest level in 40 years. Reservoirs around the state filled, and ski resorts stayed open well into the spring.

As a result, Tahoe locals, even newly arrived residents, have a lot of recent practice on how to prepare for blizzard conditions, McClain said. In some neighborhoods, people plan to dig out fire hydrants to stop them from being buried too deep in snow. In other areas, residents were tossing salt pellets on their roofs or plugging in electric roof cables to prevent huge amounts of snow and ice from building up.

Last March, the roof collapsed at the Raley’s supermarket in South Lake Tahoe under the weight of snow and ice.

“When you have too much snow on your roof, your doors and windows don’t open correctly. Eventually you can start having beams break down, and the roofs can collapse,” McClain said. “We had a huge mass of ice, 15 feet long and about 2 feet around, that formed on the roof of our house last winter. It was in front of our windows. If it had fallen, it could have broken through.”

On Thursday afternoon, Tricia Popky, a Carmel Valley nurse who has a cabin near Donner Lake, was in central Truckee buying winter gloves, firewood and kindling and a new firewood rack for the cabin. “I’m just going to be hunkering down,” Popky said. “I’m going to cook some soup. I’m so excited because I got my wood-burning stove working.”

The latest storm, a powerful cold front that is carrying an unusual amount of moisture, originated over the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia.

The National Weather Service said it will only bring 1 or 2 inches of rain to most Bay Area communities. But the storm is forecast to dump 5 to 10 feet of snow in the Sierra above 5,000 feet and 1 to 4 feet of snow at about 3,000 feet. In some high-elevation spots, 12 feet is possible by Sunday.

“If what we’re seeing from the models ends up happening, this is a truly remarkable storm system,” said Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist at the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab near Donner Summit. “It’s one that we very rarely have had before. It could set a highest snowfall on a single day for us.”

Since modern records began in 1970, the most snow the snow lab, which sits at about 6,900 feet, has ever received in one day was 53 inches, on Feb. 3, 1989.

An early inkling of the meteorological mayhem came Thursday morning when Interstate 80, the main highway over the Sierra, was closed eastbound for more than three hours after a big rig overturned near Donner Lake interchange, blocking both lanes of traffic, just as the snow was beginning to fall. The driver suffered minor injuries.

“It was pretty nasty for a while,” said John O’Connell, a Caltrans spokesman. “He was going too fast.”

Cars sat for miles all morning in stopped traffic or attempted to navigate backroads to get around it.

San Jose truck driver Erik Lopez, making a run from Stockton to Reno, was putting chains on his 18-wheeler near Kingvale on I-80 Thursday amid increasingly heavy snowfall after getting stuck in the lengthy jam. At the top of his mind was making sure he would return home to his family.

“There’s no fear in my heart,” said Lopez, 34. “But there’s safety in my heart.”

Farther east, Truckee resident Brent Martin was pulling into his garage after a sketchy trip from Sacramento in his pickup truck, traveling via backroads because of the I-80 crash. He planned to keep off highways until the storm has passed but was not expecting snow-related problems at home.

The blizzard would be “nothing compared to last year,” he predicted. “I’d shovel four feet off my deck twice a day last year.”

Martin urged non-residents to stay away this weekend.

“Tell everyone not to come up — all the Teslas and the Priuses, stay down in the Bay Area,” said Martin, 32. “That’s what causes a lot of the problems. Teslas are the new minivans — we hate ’em up here.”

The disruption Thursday wasn’t just limited to Tahoe and Donner Summit. Yosemite National Park officials said the park would be closed Friday and will not open until at least Sunday afternoon.

While a headache for motorists and first responders, the storm was a godsend to water managers. On Thursday, the statewide Sierra snowpack was 80% of its historical average, up from 28% on Jan. 1 after a wet February.

“When all is said and done, it is likely the Sierra snowpack will be significantly above average just about everywhere in as little as a week,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.

“This storm will certainly bolster the Sierra snow pack, but it is going to cause a lot of disruption.”

STINNETT, Texas — A dusting of snow covered a desolate landscape of scorched prairie, dead cattle and burned out homes in the Texas Panhandle on Thursday, giving firefighters brief relief in their desperate efforts to corral a blaze that has grown into the largest in state history.

The Smokehouse Creek fire grew to nearly 1,700 square miles (4,400 square kilometers). It merged with another fire and is just 3% contained, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service.

Dylan Phillips, 24, said he hardly recognized his Stinnett neighborhood, which was littered with melted street signs and the charred frames of cars and trucks. His family’s home survived, but at least a half a dozen others were smoking rubble.

“It was brutal,” Phillips said. “The street lights were out. It was nothing but embers and flames.”

The Smokehouse Creek fire’s explosive growth slowed Thursday as snow fell and winds and temperatures dipped, but it was still untamed and threatening. It is the largest of several major fires burning in the rural Panhandle section of the state. It has also crossed into Oklahoma.

Firefighter Lee Jones was helping douse the smoldering wreckage of homes in Stinnett to keep them from reigniting when temperatures and winds increase Friday and into the weekend.

“The snow helps,” said Jones, who was among a dozen firefighters called in from Lubbock to help. “We’re just hitting all the hot spots around town, the houses that have already burned.”

Authorities have not said what ignited the fires, but strong winds, dry grass and unseasonably warm temperatures fed the blazes.

“The rain and the snow is beneficial right now, we’re using it to our advantage,” Texas A&M Forest Service spokesman Juan Rodriguez said of the Smokehouse Creek fire. “When the fire isn’t blowing up and moving very fast, firefighters are able to actually catch up and get to those parts of the fire.”

Authorities said 1,640 square miles (4,248 square kilometers) of the fire were on the Texas side of the border. Previously, the largest fire in recorded state history was the 2006 East Amarillo Complex fire, which burned about 1,400 square miles (3,630 square kilometers) and resulted in 13 deaths.

An 83-year-old woman was the only confirmed death so far this week. But with flames still menacing a wide area, authorities have yet to conduct a thorough search for victims or tally the numerous homes and other structures damaged or destroyed.

Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said the weekend forecast and “sheer size and scope” of the blaze are the biggest challenges for firefighters.

“I don’t want the community there to feel a false sense of security that all these fires will not grow anymore,” Kidd said. “This is still a very dynamic situation.”

The woman who died was identified by family members as Joyce Blankenship, a former substitute teacher. Her grandson, Lee Quesada, said he had posted in a community forum asking if anyone could try and locate her. Quesada said deputies told his uncle on Wednesday that they had found Blankenship’s remains in her burned home.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 60 counties. The encroaching flames caused the main facility that disassembles America’s nuclear arsenal to pause operations Tuesday night, but it was open for normal work Wednesday.

The small town of Fritch, north of Amarillo, lost hundreds of homes in a 2014 fire and appeared to be hit hard again. Mayor Tom Ray said Wednesday that an estimated 40-50 homes were destroyed on the southern edge of the town of 2,200.

Hemphill County Emergency Management Coordinator Bill Kendall said about 40 homes were burned near the town of Canadian, and described the charred terrain as being “like a moonscape. … It’s just all gone.”

Kendall also reported seeing “hundreds of cattle just dead, laying in the fields.”

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller estimated the number of cattle killed in the fires to be in the thousands, with more likely to come.

“There’ll be cattle that we’ll have to euthanize,” Miller said. “They’ll have burned hooves, burned udders.”

Miller said individual ranchers could suffer devastating losses, but predicted the overall impact on the Texas cattle industry would be minimal. Cattle raised in the Panhandle are largely “range cattle,” not feeder cattle that are sold to feed lots and eventually make their way to the kitchen table for consumption, he said.

Miller said any impact on the price of beef for consumers would be minimal, and at least a year away from being felt.

Vertuno reported from Austin, Texas. Associated Press reporters Jamie Stengle in Dallas and Ken Miller in Oklahoma City contributed to this report.

They come bearing binoculars, telephoto lenses and a shared mission: To catch sight of “BB.”

That’s the name birders have bestowed on an elusive broad-billed hummingbird that is now calling Kristin Joseph’s flower-filled front yard home.

He might not be quite as eye-popping as the snowy owl that  captivated people for several weeks in January of 2023 after it veered off course and nested in north Orange County. But since BB’s variety of petite, fast-flying hummingbirds are usually only found in the canyons and woodlands of Mexico and southern Arizona, not Glendora, they can be tricky for local enthusiasts to check off their birding bucket lists.

“This is one that you don’t typically get to see in our area,” said Evelyn Serrano, director of the Audubon Center at Debs Park in Montecito Heights.

Joseph credits the fact that she and her husband have spent the past couple of years converting their yard into a paradise for pollinators. And while BB is definitely their most famous guest to date, she said they’ve enjoyed a steady parade of new visitors ever since they traded their thirsty lawn for drought-tolerant native plants.

“We’ve gotten so many new different species of butterflies. We’ve had grasshoppers, which I hadn’t seen in years. I had praying mantises, which I had not ever had,” Joseph said. “And I have a plethora of birds in my yard all day long.”

With BB, Joseph said she heard the difference even before she could see it.

As an amateur birder, she always pays attention to the visitors that wing through her yard. So when she noticed a bird humming an original tune, distinct from the familiar song she hears whenever Anna’s variety hummingbirds drop in for a drink, Joseph grabbed her binoculars.

The tiny bird’s bright red beak was the next clue. Joseph’s birding books told her she was looking at a broad-billed hummingbird, and, based on its coloring, very likely a male. So two weeks ago, she logged the sighting on eBird, a popular online database run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Someone from the lab contacted her, asking for pictures to verify the sighting. She loaded two photos on the site Feb. 11 and said people quickly began reaching out to ask if they could come see BB’s red beak, dark tail and iridescent body for themselves.

Since then, dozens of photos of BB sipping on native plant nectar in Joseph’s yard have been uploaded to the eBird site.

“It’s just been the nicest group of people,” Joseph said. “Someone left a whole thing of sugar on my porch to make more hummingbird food. A few people have left gift cards and thank you notes. They have just been so thrilled to see this bird.”

One woman told Joseph she was supposed to go with a group to Arizona to try to see a broad-billed hummingbird recently but missed the trip because she was sick. So when she heard about BB sightings not far from where she lives, Joseph said she showed up wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with a picture of a hummingbird.

“They’ve been very respectful and very happy to see that I had transformed my yard, because it’s kind of like a little habitat.”

The transformation started a couple years ago, when Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the city of Glendora were offering residents rebates if they removed turf from their property. Joseph’s long, narrow front yard had been entirely grass ever since her family moved in nearly two decades earlier. So they first spent the rebate money replacing that lawn with succulents and hardscape materials.

Many water districts also offer free classes on drought-tolerant yards. And Audobon has an online database of native plants for birds, Serrano noted, where people can enter their zip code and get advice about what plants might attract particular visitors.

Residents don’t have to transform their entire yard, Serrano pointed out. “Every little bit is helpful, not just for the birds but for insects and biodiversity.”

One of Serrano’s personal favorites is black sage, which she said is hardy, doesn’t grow too big and is popular with a variety of pollinators.

Joseph’s yard is still a work in progress, as she aims to mix in enough variety of native plants that something is blooming and feeding visitors all year. But unlike with lawns and other types of landscaping, she said once the planting is done, there’s very little maintenance with native gardens.

Neighbors have been stopping by for months to admire her new yard and to ask advice about doing something similar. Joseph gladly shares what she’s learned.

“I hope it can inspire more people because we don’t live in a fancy area of Glendora. We don’t have a gigantic yard. But anybody can do this.”

In recent weeks, Joseph said neighbors also have been coming by to ask why people have been hanging out in her driveway, pointing binoculars and cameras into her yard.

After she tells them about BB, she said some have come back with their kids and grandkids, clutching brand-new binoculars of their own.

CANADIAN, Texas — A cluster of wildfires scorched the Texas Panhandle on Wednesday, including a blaze that grew into one of the largest in state history, as flames blackened the landscape across a vast stretch of small towns and cattle ranches.

Authorities warned that the damage to communities on the high plains could be extensive.

The largest fire — which expanded to nearly 800 square miles (2,072 square kilometers) — jumped into parts of neighboring Oklahoma and was completely uncontained as dawn broke, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service.

Authorities had not reported any deaths or injuries as of Wednesday morning while huge plumes of smoke billowed hundreds of feet in the air. But officials warned residents of potentially large property losses.

Hemphill County Emergency Management Coordinator Bill Kendall described the charred terrain as being “like a moonscape. … It’s just all gone.”

Kendall said about 40 homes were burned around the perimeter of the town of Canadian, but no buildings were lost inside the community.

“We started getting those losses in the dark, so we didn’t really know what we had until this morning, until we could see,” he said.

The town of Fritch, with a population of less than 2,000, lost hundreds of homes in a 2014 fire and appeared to be hit hard again.

The people in that area are probably not “prepared for what they’re going to see if they pull into town,” Hutchinson County Emergency Management spokesperson Deidra Thomas said in a social media livestream. She compared the damage to a tornado.

The town remained unsafe for people to return, she said.

Tresea Rankin videotaped her own home in the town of Canadian as it burned.

“Thirty-eight years of memories, that’s what you were thinking,” Rankin said of watching the flames destroy her house. “Two of my kids were married there … But you know, it’s OK, the memories won’t go away.”

Authorities have not said what ignited the fires, but strong winds, dry grass and unseasonably warm temperatures fed the blazes. Near Borger, a community of about 13,000 people, emergency officials at one point late Tuesday answered questions from panicked residents on Facebook and told them to get ready to leave if they had not already.

“It was like a ring of fire around Borger. There was no way out … all four main roads were closed,” said Adrianna Hill, 28, whose home was within about a mile of the fire. She said a northern wind that blew the fire in the opposite direction “saved our butts.”

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 60 counties. The encroaching flames caused the main facility that disassembles America’s nuclear arsenal to pause operations Tuesday night, but it was open for normal work on Wednesday.

The blazes tore through sparsely populated counties on the vast, high plains that are punctuated by cattle ranches and oil rigs. The main fire, known as the Smoke House Creek Fire, had grown to more than half the size of the state of Rhode Island. It is five times larger than on Monday, when it began.

The weather forecast provided some hope for firefighters — cooler temperatures, less wind and possibly rain on Thursday. But for now, the situation was dire in some areas.

Sustained winds of up to 45 mph (72 kph), with gusts of up to 70 mph (113 kph), caused the fires that were spreading east to turn south, threatening new areas, forecasters said. But winds calmed down after a cold front came through Tuesday evening, said Peter Vanden Bosch, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Amarillo.

“Fortunately, the winds have weakened quite significantly,” Vanden Bosch said Wednesday. Breezy conditions were expected again Friday, and fire-friendly weather could return by the weekend, he said.

As the evacuation orders mounted Tuesday, county and city officials implored residents to turn on emergency alert services on their cellphones and be ready to evacuate immediately.

The Pantex plant, northeast of Amarillo, evacuated nonessential staff Tuesday night out of an “abundance of caution,” said Laef Pendergraft, a spokesperson for National Nuclear Security Administration’s production office at Pantex. Firefighters remained in case of an emergency.

The plant has long been the main U.S. site for both assembling and disassembling atomic bombs. It completed its last new bomb in 1991 and has dismantled thousands since.

Pantex tweeted early Wednesday that the facility “is open for normal day shift operations” and that all personnel were to report for duty according to their assigned schedule.

As the fires raged Tuesday, evacuations were ordered in several towns in a swath northeast of Amarillo.

The Smokehouse Creek Fire spread from Texas into neighboring Roger Mills County in western Oklahoma, where officials encouraged people in the Durham area to flee. Officials did not know yet how large the fire was in Oklahoma.

An unrelated fire in Ellis County, Oklahoma, on the Oklahoma-Texas state line, led Tuesday to the evacuations of the towns of Shattuck and Gage. The evacuation order was lifted hours later, according to county Emergency Management Director Riley Latta. The fire had unknown origins and burned an estimated 47 square miles, according to the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry.

The weather service issued red-flag warnings and fire-danger alerts for several other states through the midsection of the country, as winds of over 40 mph (64 kph) combined with warm temperatures, low humidity and dry winter vegetation to make conditions ripe for wildfires.

In central Nebraska, a mower sparked a prairie fire that burned a huge swath of grassland roughly the size of the state’s largest city of Omaha, state officials said Tuesday.

Vertuno reported from Austin, Texas. Associated Press reporters Ken Miller in Oklahoma City, Lisa Baumann in Bellingham, Washington, and Stefanie Dazio from Los Angeles contributed.

Federal and state water regulators recently told the state’s municipal water agencies and San Joaquin Valley farmers that they could count on getting just 15% of their contracted allocations this year because precipitation this winter in Northern California has fallen short of normal, despite storms that caused serious flooding in Southern California.

“Many expected the initial allocation to be higher,” Federico Barajas, executive director of the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority, which represents dozens of agencies that receive Central Valley Project water, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “This low initial allocation is particularly challenging for agricultural producers, who are reliant on these projections for planning crops to grow during the year and for acquiring the financing necessary to support food production.”

However, as reservoir managers were issuing that grim projection, they were also drawing down reservoir levels, which had soared from last winter’s heavy storms, to create space for anticipated runoffs later in the spring.

On Monday, the Sacramento River was running high and fast, nearly 70,000 cubic feet a second, thanks to elevated releases from Shasta and Oroville reservoirs, both of which still contain well over 100% of their usual amounts of water at this time of year.

The anomaly of sending so much water downstream while warning municipal and agricultural users of low allocations frames the ever-increasing difficulty – bordering on impossibility — of water management in an era of climatic volatility.

California has historically received most of its precipitation during a few winter months while the remainder of the year is dry. It’s why federal, state local agencies have constructed dozens of dams and reservoirs to collect water when it is available for delivery to users during drier periods.

However, the peaks of precipitation appear to be getting higher — witness this year’s near-hurricanes in Southern California — and the periods of drought seem to be becoming longer due to climate change. They upset the models that water managers have traditionally used to decide when to boost reservoir storage and when to increase releases.

Another big storm is expected later this week, and it could dump enough snow in the Sierra to bring the snowpack up to normal levels and eventually increase allocations to water users, but that’s speculation. Meanwhile, with the spring planting season approaching, farmers must guess how much water they will have to irrigate their crops.

However, we need more storage options, both surface and underground, and we need to resolve some knotty issues, such as the decades-long controversy over a tunnel or some other conveyance to bypass the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta so that more Sacramento River water can be sent southward for use or storage.

That project, meanwhile, is politically tied to efforts by the state to either persuade farmers on the San Joaquin River to reduce their diversions so that more water can flow through the Delta to enhance wildlife habitat, or force reductions by issuing new water quality standards for the Delta.

As the supply picture becomes less certain, California cannot afford more decades of gridlock and squabbling.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist. 

That’s why some lively debates were launched at 16 open houses put on by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last year to get public input on, as the invitation put it, the “potential reintroduction of sea otters to their historic range,” including Oregon and Northern California, a decision that is expected to be made this year.

In 2020, the service was directed by Congress to study the feasibility and cost of otter repopulation in part because of fear that an oil spill or other incident could wipe out the group concentrated around Monterey Bay. In September 2023, U.S. Fish and Wildlife rejected a fishing industry petition to remove otters’ threatened status under the Endangered Species Act because the California population has failed to grow significantly in recent decades.

There was an added incentive to keep the protection in place: the ongoing marine havoc linked to climate change. An algal bloom off the Central California coast killed hundreds of sea lions and dolphins last summer, multiple “red tides” have invaded San Francisco Bay and nearly 95% of Northern California’s kelp forest has been decimated by small purple sea urchins whose primary predator (with the sea otter out of the picture) — the sunflower sea star, or starfish — has largely died off from a wasting disease caused or exacerbated by warming ocean temperatures.

Mark Woodward had his camera trained on the same stretch of coastline off West Cliff Drive he’d been watching for months, as he religiously monitored the whereabouts of Otter 841, the viral sea otter that’s become notorious for stealing surfboards and evading wildlife officials. He spotted the unmistakable blue tag on her left flipper and knew it was her. But this time, Woodward was surprised to find a little ball of fluff right next to the famed otter

Once upon a time, vast rafts of hundreds of thousands of sea otters filled the coastal waters of the north Pacific Rim, from Baja to Japan, until they were driven to near extinction by Captain Cook and other 18th and 19th century British, Russian and American fur-trade hunters, who killed “sea beavers” to supply the Chinese imperial court with luxurious otter fur. Remnant populations were protected starting in 1911. In California in the early 1960s, survivors from around Big Sur recolonized Monterey Bay, feasting on urchins that eat kelp and revitalizing the kelp forest. A small group has even migrated south close to Santa Barbara.

Fishermen’s concerns

Now environmentalists in Oregon and California, and several Indigenous groups, including the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians in Sonoma County, are mobilizing in support of an attempt to restore otters where they’ve long been absent, including San Francisco Bay. Fishermen are not so sanguine.

At the Bodega Bay open house, an abalone diver, Doug Jung, summarized fishermen’s worries succinctly: Wouldn’t reintroduced otters “strip mine the ocean”?

Dick Ogg, a longtime fisherman, was more specific. “The potential for impact,” he said, “can’t be quantified. If they eat the juvenile crab, that could be a big deal. Dungeness crab is our No. 1 fishery.”

There was no California salmon season in 2023 because of the long drought that preceded last winter’s torrential rains, and the 2024 season is still in question. As for recreational abalone diving on the North Coast, it’s been shut down since the kelp forest collapsed (commercial abalone diving was banned long ago). Things are precarious all around for West Coast commercial fishermen, who worry about maintaining their working waterfronts.

“I still think nature will do its own work,” Ogg told the Fish and Wildlife representatives in Bodega Bay. “I wouldn’t be bothered if (otters) recolonized on their own.”

Restoring natural balance

But natural repopulation from the Golden Gate north isn’t likely. With the decline of protective coastal kelp and a now-healthy population of white sharks in the region’s waters, migrating otters stand a good chance of becoming great white snack food. But with human assistance, the reintroduction of otters could bypass the gauntlet.

If the effort succeeded, the impact on fishing might not be what is feared.

“The sea otter could very well be the salvation for … catching fish in the years ahead if we can rebuild and repair a healthy ecosystem,” suggests Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), whose congressional district includes the entire coast north of San Francisco.

In Oregon and Northern California, there is hope that the cascading imbalances human have caused — exterminated otters, sick sea stars, disappearing abalone — can begin to be set straight, and that the kelp forest habitat, rich in marine life and a buffer against torrential storms, can recover.

And yes, we need to restore many more creatures in many more habitats and ecosystems. Maybe an adorable marine weasel can motivate that, too.

David Helvarg is executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean policy group. ©2024 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

The Fremont Union High School District board of trustees voted early Wednesday morning to update the turf at Fremont, Homestead, Lynbrook, Monta Vista and Cupertino high schools, part of the district’s goal to repair and replace old turf fields over the next few years. The district serves students in Cupertino, Sunnyvale and San Jose.

“We have plans now, that is to replace the synthetic turf,” Superintendent Graham Clark said. “We don’t have plans to replace it with natural grass.”

The district used bond funding to replace 12 of its 15 grass fields between 2009 and 2013 in an effort to conserve water and improve athletic facilities. The remaining three fields were converted in 2018. The turf has a life expectancy of eight to 10 years, leading local heath and environment enthusiasts and board members to debate the change now.

“I think considering all the negative impacts, there really is no good benefits for keeping artificial turf,” said Lynbrook High School junior Daphne Zhu. “The fact that it’s plastic and not degradable or recyclable, it’s not better for athletes’ health and for the environment.”

Cupertino High School junior Clarabelle Wang supports grass as a matter of personal preference. Wang, who runs track and field, said warming up on an artificial field can be uncomfortable, especially during hot days when the turf absorbs heat. The small bits of turf that get into her shoes doesn’t make exercising an enjoyable experience, either.

“I feel like it has been more of a burden to use artificial turf, at least at my school,” Wang said. “There are lot of little rock pieces everywhere and it would get into everyone’s shoes and stuff like that.”

Making the switch to real grass would delay replacements for the already worn-out turf by a year, according to district staff. Trustee members believe students who regularly use fields for after-school activities can’t afford to wait that long.

“The music program and athletics program make our school district much stronger,” trustee Rosa Kim said. “I think it will be really, really challenging if we delay this process and then go back to natural grass.”

Synthetic turf has come under increasing scrutiny as it can can contain hazardous micro-plastics and chemicals like PFAS, known as “forever chemicals.” The latter can leach into food chains, contaminate water supplies and have negative developmental effects on children and others.

In August 2023, the Santa Clara County Medical Association penned a letter about the health concerns of artificial turf to the Los Gatos-Saratoga Unified High School District, where community members were pushing to replace turf fields with grass.

The Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club also wrote to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors in November about how the plastic turf is difficult to break down and properly dispose. The turf fades and cracks over time, the letter states, which can cause small bits of plastic to enter waterways.

Still, the benefits don’t persuade Linda Hutchins-Knowles, co-founder of Mothers Out Front Silicon Valley, to support turf. Established in 2016, the local chapter of the nationwide climate justice organization is helping parents and students advocate for grass fields. They sent a letter to the school trustees, which was supported and signed by 12 other local organizations and 96 community members, urging them to reject any future artificial turf plans.

Hutchins-Knowles thinks there are more benefits to having natural grass than artificial turf, even if district studies say otherwise. Disappointed with Wednesday’s decision, she believes trustees should do more research into natural turf alternatives and make children’s safety a priority.

“Before making a decision about future field replacement, we ask the trustees and staff to thoroughly research state-of-the art natural turf alternatives,” she said. “The health of our students and environment demand no less.”

“If people are not already up here by Thursday morning, do not come,” said Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist at the UC Central Sierra Snow Lab at Donner Summit near Lake Tahoe. “It’s a shelter-in-place situation. People up here are buying fuel today for backup generators and boarding up their windows. It’s like watching people prepare for a hurricane.”

On Tuesday, the National Weather Service issued a blizzard warning — its first of the year — for the Northern and Central Sierra Nevada. The warning extends from 4 a.m. Thursday to 10 a.m. Sunday from Lassen and Shasta counties through Lake Tahoe to Tuolumne and Mono counties near Yosemite National Park.

Snow will begin falling Thursday, and become most extreme on Friday at amounts of 2 to 4 inches an hour, posing “near to impossible” conditions for drivers, winds up to 65 mph and power outages, the National Weather Service warned, with extended road closures possible on Interstate 80 and Highway 50, the main two routes that Bay Area residents use to go to Lake Tahoe area ski resorts.

“This will be the coldest system of the season so far, with the most snow,” said Courtney Carpenter, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento.

Donner Pass along I-80 is expected to get 6 to 8 feet of new snow through Sunday.

“It’s really going to be dangerous to impossible to travel over the weekend,” she added.

The Bay Area will be spared much of the fury from the storm, a cold low-pressure system moving in from the Gulf of Alaska. Moderate rain is forecast Thursday, Friday and Saturday, with about half an inch expected each day for most Bay Area cities before dry conditions return Sunday and Monday.

An inch or two of snow could fall on some of the Bay Area’s highest peaks by Saturday, including Mount Hamilton and Mount Diablo, forecasters said.

The powerful blizzard is the latest and most dramatic example of a winter that started slow but has steadily increased, improving California’s water picture with every passing week, and all but guaranteeing that there will be few, if any water restrictions this summer for most communities in the state.

On Jan. 1, the statewide Sierra snowpack — the source of nearly one-third of California’s water supply — was just 28% of its historical average. After a wet February, it rebounded in two months to 82% on Tuesday. That number is very likely to go above 100% by Monday.

“We definitely started the winter off on the warmer and drier side,” said Jeanine Jones, interstate resources manager for the California Department of Water Resources. “Then things started picking up. The month of February was a big help in moving the snowpack numbers along.”

Californians have suffered through serious droughts in eight of the past 12 years. The dry conditions, exacerbated by climate change, have brought heat waves, urban and farm water restrictions and huge wildfires over the last decade.

The state’s most recent drought, from 2020 to 2022, ended last year when dozens of atmospheric river storms left the Sierra Nevada with its biggest snowpack in 40 years. Those storms, and the melting snow, also filled reservoirs around the state, many of which remain at high levels now.

On Tuesday, Shasta and Oroville, the two largest reservoirs in California, and linchpins of the water supply for more than 20 million people from the Bay Area to San Diego, each were 84% full.

“As we get later into the spring, the flood-control requirements will be lifted and reservoirs will be storing snowmelt runoff,” she said.

The wet February has also sent precipitation levels in Northern and Southern California to healthy totals. On Tuesday, San Jose was at 130% of its historical rainfall average for late February, San Francisco was at 116%, Sacramento was at 106% and Oakland was at 86%.

Farther south, Santa Barbara was at 159% of normal rainfall, Los Angeles 170% and San Diego 138%.

Heavy storms in recent weeks have created a temporary lake in Death Valley, usually the hottest spot in the United States. The waist-deep lake has drawn tourists with kayaks and paddle boards, creating a rare scene on the site of Lake Manly, a former lake in the low-lying Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park that evaporated tens of thousands of years ago.

So far, the winter has unfolded in a very advantageous way statewide, Schwartz said. Flooding has been minimal, and two back-to-back winters with above-average to average rainfall mean drought conditions aren’t in the cards for 2024.

“This is the year that we wanted to have after last year,” he said. “We aren’t looking at such a deep snow pack that it is going to pose flooding issues. And we aren’t looking at a moisture deficit. It’s kind of the best of both worlds.”

A massive blaze that’s raging out of control is threatening Texas Panhandle towns and forcing residents to evacuate.

The Smokehouse Creek Fire, the largest wildfire burning in the region, has exploded to 200,000 acres since igniting Monday afternoon, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service.

The blaze, driven by gusty winds and fueled by dry, unseasonably warm conditions, is moving incredibly rapidly and remains 0% contained.

Evacuations were ordered early Tuesday afternoon for parts of Hemphill and Roberts counties as the fire encroached on populated areas. This includes the town of Canadian, Texas, around an hour and half northeast of Amarillo, Texas.

Parts of Fritch, Texas, which straddles Moore and Hutchinson counties to the north of Amarillo, are also under an evacuation order for a separate fire, city officials and the Texas A&M Forest Service said.

Around 100 people could be affected by the evacuation order, Moore County Emergency Management Coordinator Tommy brooks told CNN.

A robust cold front is forecast to slice through the area Tuesday evening and will cause the wind direction to shift, which could force fires to spread in new directions.

More than 11 million people in the south-central US are under red flag warnings Tuesday as springlike warmth, gusty winds and dry air create dangerous fire weather.

Texas and Oklahoma are in the epicenter of some of the most dangerous conditions.

Multiple large wildfires ignited in the Texas Panhandle Monday under similar dry, warm and windy conditions.

At least 77,135 acres were scorched by 13 wildfires in Texas Monday, according to the forest service. The majority of the damage was done by four fires in the state’s Panhandle: the Smokehouse Creek Fire, the Grape Vine Creek Fire, the Windy Deuce Fire and the Juliet Pass Fire.

All four fires were still burning Tuesday, but three remained difficult to contain as erratic fire behavior – driven by gusty winds of 40 to 60 mph – challenged firefighters.

As of Tuesday afternoon, these fires are:

• Smokehouse Creek Fire: 100,000 acres burned (0% contained)
• Grape Vine Creek Fire: 30,000 acres burned (20% contained)
• Windy Deuce Fire: 8,000 acres burned (20% contained)

The Juliet Pass Fire was 90% contained on Tuesday afternoon after burning nearly 3,000 acres.

Temperatures will also tumble in Texas, replacing Tuesday highs in the 80s and 90s with highs in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

However, with little to no wet weather in the forecast through the weekend, firefighters will not have a helping hand from Mother Nature.

CNN’s Andy Rose contributed to this report.

Remember the US Inflation Reduction Act’s lucrative rebates for heat pumps, induction stoves and other high-efficiency electric appliances? If you don’t, it might be because the money from that particular slice of the 2022 climate law has yet to begin flowing. But a payday is finally in sight, at least for a handful of US states.

California, Hawaii, New Mexico and New York have submitted applications to the Department of Energy (DOE) for state programs to deduct IRA rebates from the purchase price of certain appliances designed to replace fossil fuel furnaces, water heaters and stoves. Several other states are expected to follow suit in coming months.

A DOE spokesperson said the agency aims to review and approve applications within 60 to 90 days of receiving them, a necessary green light for any state or US territory to receive its allocated funding. Awards range from $50 million for American Samoa to $690 million for Texas.

While the $8.5 billion rebate program is baked into the IRA, the long lag time is a byproduct of the need to distribute those incentives through individual states, each of which must craft its own program and obtain approval from the DOE. The requirement that rebates be deducted from the appliances’ price at the point of sale complicates that rollout, as do eligibility requirements based on income. Every state must figure out how to verify buyers’ earnings when they walk into a big-box store to purchase an induction stove, for example.

The IRA incentives include an $8,000 rebate for heat pumps that can warm and cool homes, which could cover roughly half the installation costs of some systems. There’s also a $1,750 rebate for heat pump water heaters, $840 for induction stoves and heat pump clothes dryers and $4,000 for electrical system upgrades.

Households are eligible for up to $14,000 in rebates if they earn less than 150% of their area’s median household income. If not, families can still claim a $2,000 tax credit for heat pumps and other appliances.

Hawaii submitted its application at the end of December. “Our current plan is to phase in a limited rebate offering beginning in the second half of 2024, with the aspirational goal of having the program fully operational by the end of 2024, contingent on DOE approvals,” said Claudia Rapkoch, the public affairs officer with the Hawaii State Energy Office.

A spokesperson for the California Energy Commission said the state doesn’t yet have a target date for making the rebates available. New York is aiming to begin rolling out rebates in the summer of 2024, according to a representative of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. New Mexico expects to begin making rebates available by the end of the year, said a spokesperson for the state’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department.

Alisa Petersen, federal policy manager for the US program at RMI, a nonprofit that promotes decarbonization, said manufacturers should be ready to fulfill demand for heat pumps and other appliances. But contractors — whom most consumers rely on when they need new equipment — will be key to the programs’ success.

“For contractors that typically install heat pumps, they are largely aware and poised to promote these rebates to their customers,” Petersen said. “For contractors where heat pumps are not currently a large part of their business, they likely will need to hear from customers before they change their business model and are not as up to speed on these rebate programs.”

“We are moving ahead with procurement for a program implementer while the DOE process continues, so that we can move quickly to issue rebates to low- and moderate-income households,” Rapkoch said. “Given that we have some of the highest electricity rates in the country, our focus is geared toward improving energy efficiency to reduce the household energy burden and make housing more affordable for families.”

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