Wintery mix leaves Sisters soggy

Winter finally arrived in Central Oregon at the beginning of last week, with the first real snowfall since the middle of November.

The weather kept Sisters' public works crews busy, as the initial snowfall quickly turned to rain. The rain-on-snow event caused localized flooding in downtown Sisters.

"We started out plowing Tuesday night, plowed through the night," said Sisters Public Works Director Paul Bertagna. "We got our (vacuum) truck - our 'sucker truck' - running early Wednesday morning and it ran for about 16 hours straight pumping various localized flooding areas..."

More than an inch of rain fell on the snow, overwhelming drainage systems.

"We had cleaned all the storm drains, so we actually had pretty good success up until they just got inundated and saturated. Damage-wise, we did pretty well. We lost a few trees; we lost a tree in the overnight park and a tree over on Pine Street, and then we also had a stormwater swale wash out across Arrowleaf (Trail) over at Ray's. There was so much water coming through the parking lot it just blew out the embankment, so we had to deal with that."

There were a few reports of downed trees elsewhere across Sisters Country, but early indications were that National Forest campgrounds and other facilities weathered the storm pretty

well.

The storm dumped a lot of snow in the backcountry, and authorities issued warnings to exercise extreme caution when venturing out, especially where conditions are slushy due to rain/snow mix. Such conditions make it easy to get bogged down and stuck.

Sisters Country was perhaps fortunate in that there wasn't a whole lot of snow on the ground to be melted off by the steady rain. Whychus Creek stayed in its channel and there were no serious washouts reported on local roads.

The weather forecast calls for more conditions of alternating snow and rain through Thursday, with Friday looking sunny and Saturday mostly cloudy but probably dry.