Los Angeles County Gets First Blizzard Warning in Decades

Parts of Southern California were issued their first blizzard warning in more than three decades on Wednesday, with the National Weather Service warned of “extremely dangerous mountain conditions” in high-altitude areas of Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties. Blizzard warnings are a rarity in Southern California, with the last one—issued in Feb. 1989, according to The New York Times—outstripping the memory of most local meteorologists. “I have to be totally honest with you guys,” one baffled newscaster said on Wednesday, the BBC reported, “I’ve actually never seen a blizzard warning. The weather system is expected to be “a snowmaker of the likes we have not seen for many years,” a senior forecaster with the National Weather Service office in Oxnard told the Los Angeles Times. The “wild and woolly” weather, as a meteorologist put it to the newspaper, is expected to stretch into the weekend, with the “cold core” of the storm set to hit on Saturday.