A historic winter storm in Southern California prompted a shutdown of the state’s largest freeway, Interstate 5, just north of Los Angeles on Friday.
The Grapevine section of the freeway, which takes drivers through the mountains that separate Los Angeles from Kern County and Bakersfield, was closed Friday morning due to snow and poor visibility. More than a foot of snow had fallen by midday in the higher elevations of the pass, according to CalTrans, California’s Department of Transportation.
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“The brunt of the storm has yet to arrive,” Brian Humphrey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department, told the New York Times on Friday afternoon.
“Our concern is mostly with the wind — that the soil will become saturated, and we’ll have trees or other items that might topple,” he added.
No timeline for when the freeway would be reopened was given.
Los Angeles was placed under its first blizzard warning in years on Friday. It will last until 4 p.m. Saturday. The snowfall is expected to get as high as 5 feet at elevations above 5,000 feet, according to the National Weather Service.
The area is also expected to see historic rainfall over the weekend.
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The storm is set to be the largest winter storm in Southern California since the 1980s, according to ABC7 meteorologist Drew Tuma.
