A portion of Highway 89 remains closed Friday after thunderstorms near Markleeville sent flash floods through the town on Wednesday night.

Due to the closure, the Markleeville Post Office will be closed until further notice. Mail service can be accessed via the Gardnerville Ranchos Post Office located at 1271 Kimmerling Road in Gardnerville. Mail service to Woodfords and Mesa Vista will still be delivered during normal operating hours.

A construction crew working on a nearby bridge told us they felt raindrops around quitting time on Wednesday.

"We kind of just started picking stuff up because it was starting to rain," said Starla Stewart with Bridgeway Civil Constructors. "And then it was just a downpour, with hail bigger than the size of our pea gravel!"

And it just kept coming. That hard rain started falling on terrain scarred by last year's wildfires - and things started to slide.

"Debris was coming down and mud, I guess from the fire," said Ofer Solomon, a subcontractor working on the bridge that day. "So all the mud was coming down the street from the mountains. It was a big wash, a huge wash, I've never seen something like that, it's been really bad."

As road crews shut down a damaged Highway 89 from Turtle Rock Park to Markleeville, the construction crew, staying in town, watched the waters inch toward their doors.

"It was very close," Stewart said. "We started shoveling all the water and the mud away to keep it from going into our rooms."

It was a long night and as the sun came up, shaping up to be an even longer day. Everything at the construction site - materials, equipment, heavy machinery - was buried in several feet of sludge. In the early hours, all they could do was wait.

"A foreman went to get some plywood, so I'm going to try and get to my machine and I'm going to track it out," Solomon said. "Then I'm waiting on instructions so we can pull at least the equipment out, because there's a lot of damage."

That portion of Highway 89 remains closed. Residents can get to Markleeville via Monitor Pass, but county officials are asking visitors to stay away from the area for the time being. There is no estimated time of reopening at this point.