Snow Falls on the 90265 Boundary Line and Makes History

• But Mother Nature Continues to Deny Malibu the Rain that Is So Desperately Needed

BY HANS LAETZ

It was, to put this delicately, a Malibu moment.

The sharply-dressed woman stood in the center of snow-covered, ice-encrusted Kanan Dume Road, cell phone to her ear, her sleek Carrera diagonally blocking the downhill lane.

“I don’t know how to drive in the snow! And I’m not moving this car until my husband gets here!”

A female California Highway Patrol officer got on her car’s loudspeaker: “Lady, if I can drive on it, you can drive on it. Move your car now!”

Some of the 30 or so penned-up car and truck drivers, stuck in Tunnel Two’s downhill bore for the last hour, were unhappy to say the least. “Push it out of the way!” one shouted at the driver of the black Porsche, brand new with a paper plate, blocking the road out of the snowbound pass. “Push it into the canyon!”

A county dumptruck plowed past, slaloming around stopped cars while heading downhill though the uphill lanes. The newly conscripted plowman—if that’s what he would be called—laughed and gave a thumbs up. It was likely the first time that this skiploader had moved snow, instead of rocks and mud.

“The fire crew is here now, and if you don’t move that car, they are going to pick it up and move it for you,” announced the same female voice on the CHP public address system. Someone took the keys, and inched the Porsche off the road.

Had the snow crisis on Kanan Dume Road ended? No, it had just moved 300 feet down the hill, where a burly cement truck driver was now refusing to leave Tunnel Three’s shelter until the road ahead of him was plowed.

Fear of the ice knew no gender bounds on Kanan Dume Road last Wednesday afternoon.

The winter low pressure system announced its presence shortly after lunch, when two enormous thunder claps echoed out of the canyons.

Although it was 55 and sunny down at Zuma Beach, a wintertime thunderhead built upas cold Arctic air met warm coastal air. Word quickly spread through the cell-phone network in Malibu that it was snowing on Kanan.

The snow level was at about 1700 feet above sea level—just at Mulholland Drive, on the ocean side of the hill. But it dipped far below that on the colder, inland side. About four inches of snow fell at the higher elevations, giving the newly-planted vineyards around Rocky Oaks the look of Germany’s Rhine Valley in the winter.

“I was here in 1986 when it snowed just like this up here,” exulted CHP Sgt. Gary Greenfield. “Except that happened at night, so it froze, and it didn’t turn to slush like this stuff did.”

From the comparative warmth of his Pasadena office, Jet Propulsion Lab meteorology expert William Patzert noted that temperatures had dropped 50-plus degrees since the 80-degree winds that had hit Malibu the week before.

“This El Niño we were supposed to have, has instead been El Busto,” he said. “And the climate system gets a lot of volatility if there is no overall pattern controlling it.

“So we had this tremendous mountain of cold air that just poured out of the Arctic last week, down to the Mexican border, and when it met some moisture, we got a snowstorm over Malibu.”

Patzert said the storm was “a once-in-a-lifetime thing. We had an event like this in 1963, but to see a really big snowfall out there we have to go back to ’49.”

Back in the mountains, as twilight fell, the snowfall turned to rain, traffic began to get heavy, and children were carted up to see the sight by their excited parents. Some kids were yanked out of school early. The snow at the Kanan turnouts was quickly churned into slushy mud.

At Tunnel Two, CHP officers in the median watched as traffic began flowing again, and took pictures of each other in the snow with their cell phones. “If we can prove we have to work in the snow, maybe they will give us those great big snow hats,” one Valley-based CHiP explained.

Warmer overnight temperatures melted a lot of the snow, although enough lingered, along with some black ice, to keep sightseers coming until most of it disappeared late Thursday.

The snow was no sooner gone than Malibu returned to a red flag alert with strong Santa Ana winds through the week, and only a slight possibility of rain in sight.

Patzert’s long-term forecast? “Well, there is weather, and there is climate. We know who is in charge of the weather: Mother Nature. But mankind is in charge of the climate, and we know things are getting warmer, there is no question about that.”