Powerful winter storms covered California last week, taking a toll on infrastructure in Burbank before capping off with light snow Wednesday afternoon.
At least 21 medium and large trees were downed throughout the city by winds that reached speeds of 30 mph said Jonathan Jones, Burbank public information officer. Many pulled up roots through pavement, damaging streets and sidewalks, and some fell onto cars, homes and blocked roadways. One large tree was downed at Ralph Foy Park.
“I have lived in Burbank all my life and we would always get wind around February or March. A tree might go down about every five years and that was big news,” said Wendy Etter, a 65-year Burbank resident. “This year was the worst I’ve ever seen it. I did notice this year that the downed trees fell from east to west.”
BWP had one water service connection that was affected by a fallen tree, Jones said. The resident was without water for approximately 12 hours until BWP was able to temporarily reroute water service to the home.
Jones reported that 2,106 BWP customers went without power for some period of time during the storms.
“The customers were all part of an outage initially affecting 18 customers due to a wire down,” Jones told the Leader. “Due to the proximity of other wires and the system’s configuration, four total circuits were de-energized to allow workers to safely make repairs; 1,362 customers were restored in 40 minutes. The remaining 744 customers were restored in 73 minutes.”
The Burbank Fire Department received approximately 25% more service calls last weekend compared to this time last year, Jones said. Friday, Feb. 24, was the busiest day with 72 responses for service, approximately double the amount for a typical Friday in Burbank.
According to the National Weather Service, Feb. 24 was the wettest February day at Hollywood Burbank Airport since records began there in 1939 at 6.88 inches, beating the previous record of 4.5 inches set on Feb. 8, 1993.
Snow pellets, or graupel, fell Wednesday afternoon at about 1 p.m., sticking for a short time in higher elevation areas including Stough Canyon. This form of precipitation occurs when supercooled water droplets collect and freeze on falling snowflakes. Graupel has the appearance of small clumps of snow.
This month’s winter storm will be followed up by more rain pushing through Southern California, with at least one more atmospheric river expected to make landfall in March, bringing more rain and snow to an already soaked region and prompting the National Weather Service to issue a winter weather warning for Los Angeles County mountains.
