Sunday, December 21, 2008

Sunday Afternoon in Beautiful Beaverton

I took the dogs out again. Had enough foot traffic that the ice is broken up on the sidewalk to the Rite-Aid, which is now open. About 25 F. -- that's a little below zero for you Centigrade fans -- and a bit of mixed rain/ice pellets starting to come down.

That's not good.

The danger with freezing rain, of course, is that it coats everything; branches and power lines get heavy. Power outages are usually when a big branch, or tree, over-burdened with ice, snaps and falls on a likewise glazed power line and takes it down.

Our power is underground here, but that doesn't help with the feeder lines on poles.

Only a few thousand folks in the Portland area without power at the moment, but they expect that number will grow.

Got some guy in a chained pick-up truck with a plow-blade clearing paths in the parking lot at the Rite-Aid. Didn't have any rock salt, but table salt will work -- somewhat -- and it's cheap enough to use a box or two. Gave me an excuse to walk to the store and get out of the house to enjoy the winter wonderland.

I'm ready for summer now.

4 comments:

steve-vh said...

We're officially in a blizzard until 10AM now. then another system moving in Tuesday.

Stephen Grey said...

Today I've been thinking "wow, this has been a pretty easy winter."

Right now it's 1 degree. We've had about a foot of snow in the last couple of days, roughly. Pretty soon it's going to be -30.

I really need to move to the pacific northwest.

steve-vh said...

Our snowfall total to date this season is over 43" as reported by the local station aways in from the lake. Ours is most likely higher for several reasons. We live on the edge of a dense forest of state land in a former pine tree farm that has overgrown. The snow seems to hold in the clouds until it clears the trees on the edge of our neighborhood and then DUMP on us by about 30% more. Not that I'm complaining. I marvel at the vagaries of weather.

heina said...

New York was fairly gnarly today. This morning was sub-zero with windchill. The guys who came in from Jersey said it was one of the top five worst commutes they'd ever had...thought they were going to puke it was so cold and you couldn't breathe. Middle of the country should be even worse. Canada is hypothermia dangerous at the moment. Fun fun fun cold snap!