Wind gusts to 89 mph blow out store front

Scott Sonner

Monday, Nov. 23, 1998 | 6:16 a.m.

RENO - Winds gusting off the Sierra Nevada at up to 89 mph blew out two plate glass windows at a closed restaurant Monday, downed power lines and trees and turned nearby valleys into dust bowls.

"It sounded like a bomb exploded," said Lisa Mohun of Truckee, Calif., who was 20 feet away when the windows blew out of the Two Giraffe's Bar and Grille in downtown Reno.

"We thought we were in a war zone," she said.

Just seconds before, Mohun and Kim Toliver, Truckee, Calif., had pulled up in a car in front of the restaurant at the corner of Lake and East Second Street two blocks east of the main casino district.

"We were counting our money for the meter," Toliver said. "If we'd gotten out 5 seconds earlier, we'd have been hit" by flying glass.

The glass shattered in the street just before 3 p.m. and police closed it off to traffic for about half an hour.

One of the plates of glass was about 15 feet long by 5 feet high. The other was about 8 feet long. Some of the larger shards stuck in the booths of the closed restaurant.

"If people had been in there they would have been hit with glass," Toliver said.

The winds blew the roof off an apartment building on Hubbard Street in Reno, flipped a small plane parked at the Douglas County Airport and toppled a 35-foot tree at the State Capitol grounds in Carson City.

The National Weather Service reported a wind gust of 89 mph at its Washoe weather station just north of Reno at 1:55 p.m.

The service said a wind gauge was destroyed about 2 p.m. at a station in Lemon Valley, where blowing dust brought visibility to near zero.

A roof was blow off a greenhouse and an out building was blown down in the valley, but no other damage reports was reported.

Sustained winds of 35 to 55 mph were the rule across much of northern Nevada Monday, downing trees, ripping billboards, snapping railroad crossing bars and knocking traffic signals out of service.

Wind gusts of 78 mph were reported at the Desert Research Institute building in Stead, 73 mph at Stagecoach and 61 mph at Cold Springs, the weather service said.