Snowmageddon 2012

I haven't been blogging for the past few days because of the crazy weather we've had this week. Bloggers and some media outlets will try and tell you that Seattle over-exaggerated the outcome of the storm we had. At first, we really did. Wednesday is when the snow poured on and areas saw anywhere between 1 to 14 inches of snow. Oddly enough, the roads were not undriveable and many businesses remained open. But many of us, including myself, stayed home and played it safe. It was a nice day off. I built a snowman with Juliana and took her sledding.

Overnight, our region went into sub-freezing temperatures and the snow and water that was on the roads from the day turned into freezing rain and solid ice on Thursday. That's when all the problems began. Yesterday, my alarm woke me up at 6 a.m. and I discovered that our house was out of power. A call to Puget Sound Energy told us that 90,000 people were in the same boat and that it's possible that they wouldn't get to our location until the evening, maybe even the weekend.

Having no source of heat other than our water heater, I texted our families and asked what their statuses were. My parents, Bethany's parents, and Bethany's sister all still had power, but one-by-one texts came back to me saying "We just lost power." Our best option was spending the night at my in-laws' who had hot water and wood and gas fireplaces. I wasn't about to go driving in these conditions, so my father-in-law came to pick us up in his 4-wheel drive vehicle. And seeing the roads yesterday made me glad I chose not to venture out in one of our cars.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we have lots of trees. Our state is nicknamed the Evergreen State and we're proud to have so many green trees up year around. Well, when snow and ice cling to those trees, they fall over. And some of them fall over onto power lines. By the afternoon, over 210,000 homes were reported to have no power (at this time, that number has reached 260,000). We tried to go to a fast food restaurant yesterday to pick up some dinner, but everywhere was closed either due to power outages or lack of employees. We tried Safeway which was miraculously open despite also being powerless. They were running the cash registers and lights on generators, but the freezer aisles were down. It felt apocalyptic.

Power still has not been restored to our house and it's been going on like that for over 30 hours now. Bethany's parents just had their power restored, so we might end up staying there another night if PSE can't get us figured out soon. I was able to make it into work with minimal slipping and sliding around the smaller side streets near our neighborhood. The freeways were perfectly clear.

We might not be as prepared for or as experienced with the snow as states like Montana or Michigan, but I wouldn't call Seattlites "Snow Wimps" or "Clueless" like the LA Times did. Hopefully this provides a little explanation. Plus, Californians seem to freak out more when there a little bit of rain on the road.