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For the last week or so, Portland has been in the icy grip of winter come early. It's been snowing pretty much every day: everything from a light sprinkle to a full blizzard with howling 50mph winds over at Troutdale, where cold wind has been roaring down the Columbia River Gorge. When the snow first started, the weather teams on the news were fairly unconcerned. They expected less than an inch of snow in Portland itself and told us that the system would move on soon. Here's Christine out in the light snow of the first day, when it was a fun novelty (as an Australian, I'm easily impressed by snow and still find it fascinating!).

However, it soon became apparent that the cold, snowy weather was going to set in for a longer period of time, and basically, all hell broke loose. As I may have mentioned before, Portland TV news is obsessed with the weather, and any sort of snow storm at all was an excuse for that obsession to become full-blown scare-mongering. You'd think it was the end of the world based on the coverage that a couple of inches of snow is getting. Entire news bulletins have been given over to the weather (Seriously! There was no other news at all, nothing local, national or international!), filled with radar and satellite images, ODOT highway camera shots and a veritable horde of reporters stationed at every potential motoring trouble spot around town. They went to tire shops to report that snow chains had sold out, we were warned to stock up on food in case we couldn't leave the house, they told us that roads were icy and impassable and that we shouldn't leave the house unless our needs were imperative and urgent. In short, a media-hyped "Snowpocalypse" was upon us, and yea verily, Portland trembled in fear.

Christine, having grown up in Idaho Falls – where they can get huge amounts of snow each winter – was incredulous. People interviewed on the news who were from Spokane and Montana were similarly dismissive of Portland's hysterical attitude to a tiny bit of snow. Because faced with the terrifying prospect of 2 to 3 inches of snow, the city basically shut down. Schools closed for the entire week. Businesses told their staff not to come in to work. Churches cancelled services. The roads are almost entirely devoid of traffic.

In a way, the hysteria is somewhat justified, purely because Portland just isn't used to snow. It rarely snows on the floor of the Willamette Valley, and sticking snow is rarer still. Until this last week, I had only seen tiny flurries of sad, wet snow that lasted for 20 minutes or so in Portland, melting almost as soon as it hit the ground. Sustained snow like this is a rare occurence and Portlanders don't know how to deal with it. Multnomah County only has a handful of snow plows and de-icing trucks. Even working around the clock, they can't keep all of Portland's roads clear. People aren't used to driving on snowy or icy streets - many people interviewed on the news have admitted to not knowing how to fit snow chains at all - and accidents then ensue. I've seen something very similar to this when I was in England in January 2004. A light dusting of snow across the south-east of the country basically brought everything to a complete standstill for three days for exactly the same reasons - little or no infrastrucure to deal with it, and a lack of knowledge amongst drivers.

The weather only really got nasty last night, as the snow turned into what is known as freezing rain. This rain freezes instantly upon landing, and covers every surface with thick, crunchy ice. The snow, which had been fresh and fluffy up until then, suddenly had a creme brulee-like crust of ice on top, which broke as you walked upon it. Cars were rimed with thick ice, which has to be broken off before going anywhere.

Here, Christine inspects our car as we attempted to thaw it out this morning. The engine is on with the heater at full blast to defrost the window from the inside - you can see a lighter patch of ice where it is beginning to detach from the windscreen. Then it's a matter of scraping and tapping the ice off the windows until they are clear. The process took us over half an hour; some of the ice on the window was a good 5mm thick!

This is the view as we drove down Interstate Avenue after freeing our car. A good few inches of snow mask the lane markings and the curb, but the All Wheel Drive of the Subaru does an admirable job of making driving in these conditions relatively easy. Certainly not anywhere near as bad as the news would have you believe. One thing to note is that the MAX light rail (the tracks are in the middle of the road above) was not running along the Yellow Line through our neighbourhood today. The points down at the Rose Quarter have frozen solid, making it impossible for trains to come our way! Trains are also not running to the airport for the same reason - not that it matters, as most flights out of PDX have been cancelled. I-84 through the Columbia River Gorge has also been closed due to the blizzard through there last night. This turn of events certainly merits the media's attention, but after having been told that the End of Days is upon us for over a week now, it kind of feels like the boy who cried "wolf!" to me now - if you sensationalise everything, then what do you do when things actually get bad?

Posted in: chaosboy, portland, weather on December 21, 2008 at at 3:36:00 PM