"Just buried": Residents of area hit by avalanche talk about slide, luck and more snow on the way
OLYMPIC VALLEY -- Residents in Olympic Valley had a scare after an avalanche barreled through a neighborhood and hit a three-story apartment complex.
It was just another Tuesday night for Randy Rogers. Snow piling up in the Olympic Valley and nothing new to report as emergency crews tended to the roads and highways. Then he heard the sirens.
"It was snowing and that kind of muffles things," Rogers says. "It was kind of quiet. I walked out there to see what was going on and that we had a big avalanche."
When he stepped out of his house he walked a couple of doors down to see a three-floor condo complex that had been hit by the slide. The first two floors had been completely inundated with snow.
"This condo complex has about 70 units we have about four units that had to be evacuated," Placer County Sheriff PIO Angela Musallam tells CBS13.
Miraculously, no lives were lost and no injuries were reported. Rogers, who has been living up in the Shirley Canyon Rd. area for the better part of 19 years, says the timing of the avalanche may have been a saving grace.
"In the daytime, we get a lot of people walking back there with their dogs or snowshoeing that area," he explains. "And that condo complex doesn't have a lot of people living there in the winter."
"This was a huge win for us and all the residents of Olympic Valley," says Musallam.
Due to the risk of additional slides and more snow reported in the forecast this weekend, the Placer County Sheriff's office ordered a mandatory evacuation. Shirley Canyon Rd. resident Valerie Burman tells CBS13 that it's the first time an evacuation order for an avalanche specifically has happened in the years that she's lived in the area. Some decided to leave and others decided to stick it out.
A total of seven residences are under mandatory evacuation orders, the sheriff's office says. Another 100 residences are under evacuation warnings.
Rogers wasn't taking any chance and decided to get a spot in the Palisades village for the next few days.
"We couldn't even get out of the driveway and so we just grabbed our backpacks and grabbed the wife the kids and the dog and walked back to the village," he says.
"To people who are traveling from out of the area we discourage travel to these backcountry areas," Musallam concludes.
More snow is expected in the forecast for the Tahoe region this weekend.
