For many of us, winter snow is an occasional inconvenience. For those living in the Sierra Nevada region of California though, it's a way of life.
Placer County stretches roughly 65 miles from the suburbs of Sacramento all the way to the border of Nevada and the shore of Lake Tahoe. Dealing with massive amounts of snow, with few places to move it, is a regular problem here. But this winter was truly exceptional. More than 700 inches of snow fell, making it their second snowiest on record.
On this week's episode, Donny Francis, Placer County's Road District Superintendent, talks about what this winter was like and the huge effort that was needed to try and keep the county's roads clear.
About the Across the Sky podcast
The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:
Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.
Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
Hello, everybody. Meteorologist Joe Martucci here with the Across the Sky podcast, Lee Enterprise's national weather podcast. I am joined this week with Sean Sublette from the Richmond Times Dispatch. Matt Holiner in the Midwest. Kirsten Lang is on maternity leave. We wish her the best. She delivered a healthy baby boy not too long ago, so congratulations to her. We miss her.
We will see her in a couple of months. We'll be back here on the podcast sometime later in June or July. Guys, this week we're talking about snow. And I know for many of you listening, you're like, Hey, snow season ended a month ago or three months ago. Or if you're like Sean and I, we didn't even have a snow season.
But that is a much different story out west. We'll take you to Lake Tahoe, where one town, two homes got 435.4 inches of snow. Another place got over 700 inches of snow, and that is with Donny Francis. He is the road district superintendent for Placer County in California. Was talking to us all about. You may not know Placer County, but you do.
Now, one of the towns there that is Tahoe Cities is right at Lake Tahoe. They actually have an interesting mix of the valley areas, the foothills and then these mountains here. We had the pleasure of chatting with him. We'll go over to Shawn. This was quite the episode, especially for us. Shawn, where I think we saw maybe combined like White Point eight inches of snow between Richmond and South Jersey.
I mean, yeah, we're our big snow seasons here are 20 or 30 inches you know and they would get that in a day, you know, several hundred inches of snow this year in Tahoe. And, you know, his county there goes from from the Central Valley all the way up toward Lake Tahoe. So have a huge range in elevation there.
And they have to serve areas around ski resorts, too. So they have a wide variety of terrain. They've got to handle narrow roads with these population, you know, these small population centers that are densely populated right around the ski areas. And just some of the things that they have to do to get this job done are phenomenal. Well, after this winter and all the snow pictures we were seeing on social media and all the news stories about just round after round, we knew we had to get somebody on the podcast to talk about that, who is out there in the trenches dealing with injury, like somebody from like the Department of Transportation or somebody who's
clearing the roads because what does it take to clear hundreds of inches of snow? I mean, where it is just dumping and dumping. So I am so glad that we are on the show because it is truly a unique experience, you know, and this hasn't happened in a long time. So some good stories to share. Yeah. Especially when he talks about the number of hours that that they've worked over the year