People with tickets for “Uncle Vanya” at the ACT Theatre were out of luck, too, as Seattle got its biggest snowfall in a decade this week, and performance venues up and down the Pacific Northwest coast went dark. Justin Timberlake bailed out on his scheduled Tacoma Dome show Sunday, and Michelle Obama rescheduled an appearance in support of her new book. Hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled Saturday at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and the problems continued into Sunday.
In Seattle, the muscle memory just isn’t there for big snow — whether in deploying salt spreaders and plows or in getting a snow-day reprieve from an algebra test — so the responses, for better or worse, are sharpened by the novelty.
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington declared a state of emergency, and Seattle’s Emergency Management office urged people to be prepared to lose power if lines go down. Interstate 90 was closed Sunday morning in both directions east of Seattle because of blowing and drifting snow.
The National Weather Service said that Seattle, less than halfway into the month, has already had its snowiest February since 1949, after 7.9 inches were recorded at the airport Friday and Saturday. And three more storms, backed up one behind the other on a slippery slope from Canada, are heading toward the region starting Monday, said Jacob DeFlitch, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
“Right now, we have two systems coming in later Sunday to early Monday,” DeFlitch said. “Then we have a system right on the heels of that system that will be late mainly Monday afternoon through early Tuesday morning. It looks like there could then be another system Thursday-Friday.”
Seattle said it would keep a Severe Weather Shelter open near the Space Needle through Feb. 17, and the Human Services Department had partnered with a private operator to open a shelter for families downtown.
DeFlitch said with more than 10 inches measured so far, it won’t take much more for this February to break the month’s record of 13.1 inches.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.