Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna told a news conference Wednesday that people should be prepared to leave and expect to be away from their homes for multiple days.
“Remember, if you’re ordered to leave, you may be gone for several days. I cannot stand up here and tell you will be gone for 12 hours, 24 hours,” he said. “We don’t know. It depends on the weather and the post-weather events that will impact your specific neighborhood.”
A particular concern is the large number of unhoused people in the L.A. metro area. Many who are camped in high-risk areas have been warned and told to relocate.
“Unfortunately, we witnessed numerous, numerous instances in the past of swift-water rescues where people were caught in dangerous, fast moving water, and obviously, we want to prevent that,” Luna said at the news conference.
Elsewhere, heavy snow is due to move in across Western states Thursday and Friday, with the heaviest around the Sierra Nevada, where between 6 to 8 feet of snow is expected, the weather service said. Travel will become hazardous here and in mountainous parts of western Colorado and Utah.
Freezing rain is also a risk in the Pacific Northwest, with 0.1 inches of ice expected to form Thursday.
The Arctic weather system currently creating snowy and freezing conditions in the central and the southern Plains will move east and into the Atlantic on Saturday. Temperatures are still frigid in some areas, reaching 15 to 25 degrees below seasonal averages in the Mississippi Valley and the Plains. An extreme cold warning is still in place over much of North Dakota.
Almost 200,000 energy customers were without power Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us, as the cold snap continued across much of the East Coast and the mid-Atlantic.
Heavy snow will continue to develop over New England, the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley on Thursday, before turning east to the central Appalachians, where there is a risk of hazardous travel conditions, tree damage and possible power outages.
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