'Miracle' snow brings joy to East Bay residents
BERKELEY, Calif. (KGO) -- The cold weather has made for a very exciting President's Day in the East Bay, especially for kids who had the day off school and were able to enjoy an afternoon snow flurry.
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According to the National Weather Service, the last time it snowed in the East Bay hills was 2011 and before that, it was 1976.
Monday's brief storm brought a mix of snow and hail to the East Bay and a flood of videos to social media. Marcus Brown and his friend Harris Sahar were hanging out on top of Grizzly Peak in Berkeley when the hail and snow began to fall late in the afternoon.
They posted cellphone videos of the weather online, as the snow and ice quickly hit the ground and melted. "We were up here for 40 minutes where it would go from being really light to really heavy, to light again."
Sahar says the brief storm was very exciting, "Everyone going crazy, just like its snowing, it's a Christmas miracle, Santa Claus is up here or something."
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Down the mountain in Berkeley, 6-year-old Simon Gray-Droste described throwing a ball of ice that he collected in his backyard. "I would hold it flat like a pancake and throw it!" Gray-Droste says he ate some of the snow and that it tasted like, "regular snow, in like Vermont."
Hours after the snow and ice melted, temperatures continued to drop. "It's so much colder here than it usually is and my roommate had to run home in the hail from the gym," says Marandah Field-Elliot, a student at UC Berkeley who is from Colorado.
Her friend, T.J. Grayson, bundled up in a jacket says the winter cold snap took him by surprise, "I felt like two days ago I was tanning on my patio and now I need to have layers on layers just to make it to a sushi restaurant."
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