Late-winter California blizzard continues to rage in Sierra Nevada

A powerful blizzard pummeling California brought double-digit feet of snow; 190mph wind gusts; closures of a main trucking artery, national parks and ski resorts; and even a tornado. And that was just day one.

Ski resorts in the Sierra foothills reported more than 2ft of snow accumulated in the 24 hours from Thursday evening to Friday evening. Snowfall at the Northstar ski resort in Truckee, California, was up to 44in (1 meter) since Thursday afternoon.

Below 2,500ft, up to 10ft (3 meters) of snow is expected in some areas. The National Weather Service (NWS) said early on Saturday that widespread blowing snow was creating “extremely dangerous to impossible travel conditions”. The combination of snow and high winds was most intense in the Sierra Nevada, with more than 3in (7cm) of snow falling per hour and wind gusts over 100mph (160km/h).

NWS meteorologist William Churchill said snow totals by late Sunday would range from 5ft to 12ft (1.5 to 3.6 metres), with the highest accumulations at elevations above 5,000ft (1,500 metres). Lower elevations were inundated with heavy rain.

He called the storm an “extreme blizzard for the Sierra Nevada, in particular, as well as other portions of Nevada and even extending into Utah and portions of western Colorado”. But he said he didn’t expect records to be broken.

“It’s certainly just about as bad as it gets in terms of the snow totals and the winds,” Churchill said. “It doesn’t get much worse than that.”

Lake Tahoe’s Palisades ski resort – the largest resort in the area and site of the 1960 Winter Olympics – recorded multiple gusts of wind above 150mph (240km/h) and one on Friday evening that reached as high as 190mph (305km/h) on its aptly named Siberia summit at 8,700ft.

“High to extreme avalanche danger” is expected in the backcountry through Sunday evening throughout the central Sierra, including the greater Lake Tahoe area, the weather service said.

“It’s a blizzard,” said Dubravka Tomasin, who has been a resident of Truckee, California, for more than a decade. “It’s pretty harrowing.”

California authorities on Friday shut down 100 miles (160km) of I-80 due to “spin outs, high winds and low visibility”. They had no estimate when the freeway would reopen from the California-Nevada border just west of Reno to Emigrant Gap, California.

Kyle Frankland, a veteran snowplow driver, said several parts of his rig broke as he cleared wet snow from underneath piles of powder.

“I’ve been in Truckee 44 years. This is a pretty good storm,” Frankland said. “It’s not record-breaking by any means, but it’s a good storm.”

About a half million people are under blizzard warnings in California’s mountain and foothill regions with an additional 6 million under winter storm warnings across the northern California region.

Pacific Gas & Electric reported at about 5am on Saturday that 33,000 households and businesses were without power. By 10am, that number had fallen to less than 24,000, according to PowerOutage.us.

A tornado touched down on Friday afternoon in Madera county and caused some damage to an elementary school, said Andy Bollenbacher, a meteorologist with the NWS Hanford.

Some of the ski resorts that shut down on Friday said they planned to remain closed on Saturday to dig out with an eye on reopening on Sunday, but most said they would wait to provide updates on Saturday morning.