It’s been a winter of massive snowfall and torrential rain in the Kern River Valley and the mountains that surround it.
And virtually everyone who lives there has been affected.
On Friday and Saturday, an atmospheric river slammed into the region, located about an hour northeast of Bakersfield, causing road closures, travel woes, flooding, evacuation orders and uncertainty.
But it's not over.
According to forecasts, the extreme weather is expected to continue through the month of March.
"The devastation in the campground is astonishing. I can't even estimate how many loads of dirt I will have to bring in," said Beverly Demetriff, manager and part owner of Frandy Campground, which borders the Kern River in Kernville.
By late Friday afternoon, the north fork of the Kern River had exceeded 45,000 cubic feet per second — not a record volume of water, but extreme nonetheless, and more than enough to cause it to rise above its banks in Kernville, and as Demetriff describes it, dig deep gullies across the campground, carrying away tons of soil and leaving mounds of debris.
Demetriff has seen plenty in her 19 years at Frandy, but she's never seen the river do what it did over the weekend.Â
"In truth, I was expecting the worst, but I wasn't expecting 45,000 cfs."
She was concerned enough to move everything portable to higher ground before the storm hit — and that may have been the saving grace.
Evacuations were ordered during the storm Friday by the Kern County Fire Department in areas of Kernville believed to be hazardous. But on Sunday, KCFD Operations Division Chief Cary Wright said by video posted to the department's Facebook page that property damage is being assessed, and the department is "eventually looking at repopulation of both Kernville and McFarland." No timeline was given.
Early Sunday evening the Kern County Roads Department listed more than 50 closures of roads under its jurisdiction, but the announcement surely came as no shock to KRV residents who have watched Highway 178 through the Kern River Canyon and several other area roads, close then open then close again over the past several weeks.
On Monday, the KCFD released an evacuation order for a neighborhood in upper Wofford Heights in the Cane Peak Court area over concerns of a potential landslide "due to observed soil instability."
"Residences that are north and south of Bruton Way, including homes on Cane Peak Court and Homestead Court, east to Split Mountain Way and homes on Anchorage Way east to Earl Pascoe Road" were affected, the evacuation order said.
Allen Moffatt, who lives in the affected area, said despite the evacuation order, he was staying.
"If I was in harm's way, I would leave," Moffatt said, in a conversation through Facebook comments.
Another resident told Moffatt she was leaving, but Moffatt wasn't budging.
"I have neighbors drinking beer and barbecuing," said Moffatt, who is 53, and whose family has been in the valley since the early 1960s.
"We been through fires, snowed in for days, rained out. The way the neighborhood is set up, there's a couple places that could be in danger," he said.
"But most of us are safe."
