Did you say turn left? No can do. It’s an icy hill, and the prospect of a downward skid, foot mashing the brake pedal, is very real. Left at the next intersection instead? Another vertigo inducer, of which the glacier-carved city has many.
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.
Snow isn’t unheard-of here in the nation’s upper northwest corner. This isn’t Atlanta or Tallahassee, Florida, where the rare falling flake can send people flocking into the street to shiver and stare up in wonder with their tongues extended. But neither is it Denver or Chicago, where anything short of an all-out blizzard merits little more than a shrug.
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. Kids and their parents commandeered city streets for sledding, sometimes blocking traffic with homemade signs.
Then there’s frozen pizza. Or perhaps more accurately, there isn’t frozen pizza. The gene for nesting indoors in extreme weather appears to be connected to the gene for pepperoni, so the shelves in the freezer aisle were stripped bare in many stores. Tofu was still widely available.
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 on 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.”
Pacific Northwest winters are famous for their persistent but temperate gloom, with storm tracks and prevailing winds that usually bring Pacific Ocean clouds and moisture directly east into the Puget Sound region. That familiar pattern — days of rain and drizzle that are short and dark but rarely all that cold — also produces big snows, but farther inland in the Cascade Range, where those storm systems smack into the colder, higher mountain elevations east of Seattle.
This year, though, the Pacific storms have veered inland much farther north, in British Columbia, and then have stayed colder over land as they moved down the coast.
That has produced a grab-bag of unusual weather. Some areas northwest of Seattle, for example, on the usually rainy Olympic Peninsula, got more than 2 feet of snow in Friday’s storm. But the Cascade Range, from Washington south into Oregon, has so far seen much less snow than average, with possible repercussions later this year for water supplies and fire danger.
Seattle, with high housing prices and a big homeless population, also worries about keeping people warm and safe when frigid weather hits. The city 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. A 24-hour warming shelter for families with children will be open at least through Monday morning, the city said; about 270 people took overnight refuge at four other locations Friday night, including City Hall and the King County Administration Building.
DeFlitch, the meteorologist, said that with more than 10 inches measured so far, it won’t take much more for this February to break the month’s current record of 13.1 inches.
That was set in February 1949, before frozen pizza was available for a supermarket raid. And in those days, hearing a disembodied voice in your car telling you to turn left was something few people would admit to in any weather.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.