Snow and the Seattleite

Yes, I have written about extremes of weather before, both hot and cold, both in my personal blog and here on Vocal. Click the links; they're interesting.

And yes, I do fully realize that many of you in places with historically more seasonal variation think Seattle folks are wimps about driving in snow or merely existing in heat, and we are.

But there's a reason for it. Well, a few reasons, actually.

First reason? This isn't normal for us. What used to be once every ten to twenty years or so is now a nearly yearly phenomenon. None of the people who learned to drive here know how to drive in snow; we never had to learn.

Second reason (because of the first)? Just as with heat over 100F, we haven't the infrastructure to deal with a lot of snow. I think King County (where Seattle is) has maybe a dozen snowplows all told, to cover around 2300 square miles. I know my workplace has a plow they can attach to one of the maintenance and landscaping trucks (although we may be borrowing it from the city Parks Department; the school district's transportation department and city vehicles share a compound). And the school district that we live and I work in (60+ square miles) covers two counties (King and Snohomish), three cities (Bothell, Kenmore, and Woodinville), and assorted unincorporated areas. This makes for weird jurisdictional issues when it comes to plowing.

You can imagine how the various socio-political groups deal with questions of road safety in an area that big. Just because the roads are well-plowed in a neighborhood within the Bothell city limits doesn't mean they're safe in unincorporated county land on the other end of the school district. Especially since the unincorporated areas at the other end of the district are rather closer to the mountains.

Oops, I seem to have digressed. Today is not a school day (nor is there one for another week), so the bits above about the school district are not really relevant to the discussion at hand... except that it shows how fractured our infrastructure around here is. In fact, one year (before this started being a yearly thing), I was working at a mall in north Seattle, got snowed in (all the King County snowplows were up at Snoqualmie Pass), spent the night with a friend in their apartment within walking distance, and got back to work the next morning to find that the mall's sprinkler system had frozen and the pipes had burst. Walking into a retail workplace on a frozen, snowy morning, with the entire mall about ankle deep in icy water, two days before Christmas was... well, it was an experience.

Third reason? Our snow is (usually) wet. Really wet, like it doesn't get driveable until you're way up at one of the mountain passes (which are generally the best-plowed areas as well, because, well, mountains). And when it warms to above freezing during the day, the top layer of wet snow melts. And when it then dips into the twenties (Fahrenheit) at sundown, that top layer freezes into an ice slick. Even my dad, who learned to drive in the snow when he was young in Boston Massachusetts, declines to drive in (the usual) Seattle snow.

I can drive in the snow. I don't, though, unless it's required by my workplace. And since I am no longer retail or customer care, that only happens during the school year, which this is not. And not a lot then, really, unless we get caught by a surprise storm. I've been saying for a couple of days that my favorite caveat to my workplace is no out-of-district transportation.

But at least it held off until all of me and mine were snug in our wee little beds. And that's the important thing.