Over three hundred people at a climate action conference had to be rescued on Thursday, March 13 after a heavy snow storm left them stranded at a camp near Big Bear.
The group began to leave YMCA Camp Whittle in Fawnskin, where the conference was held, walking through roughly two feet of snow in an attempt to get to an area where the roads were clear enough for buses to wait.
Initially, those buses were stuck in the snow, and that caught the eye of firefighters, including Captain Anthony Muscarello. The buses happened to be stuck near San Bernardino County Fire Station 96, almost two miles from the camp.
“Within a few minutes, we had a couple hundred people standing in a blizzard in front of our station, waiting to get on these buses that were getting stuck and didn’t know the best way to get down,” Muscarello said.
They opened up Station 96 and let people warm up as Muscarello and his colleagues tried to help figure out the best way for the seven buses to get down the mountain. As more and more people trickled down from the camp towards the station, with others still stranded at the camp, the firefighters realized that with waning daylight, something had to be done to assist them.
