About that Portland weather...
Dear Tina,
I heard that you and Amy finally cancelled your late show on Saturday at the Moda Center due to the bad weather in Portland. Your early show that afternoon was shockingly not cancelled even though the County, city and every transportation and weather service were warning people to stay off the roads Saturday. I’m not sure who had the decision to make, whether it was the venue or your tour company but it was a bad call to even let that early show go on. I heard you had poor attendance at the early show as people weren’t going to risk their lives to travel to a show. What upset me though was hearing on the local news Sunday morning, that you had mocked the weather in Portland – that for a mere 2 inches of snow your late show had to be cancelled. I’ll say some more about that but first I’ll share my Thursday.
Everyone in the city was gathering groceries and needed supplies. But in the early afternoon the sun came out briefly and I headed to Mount Tabor for a walk. Only a few people were there walking their dogs or running. It felt like I had the top of the mountain to myself. I walked through the Douglas Firs thinking about what was to come.
It’s hard to think of everything to be prepared but I try. I couldn’t see Mount Hood covered in clouds but the city view was nice through the trees.
Rain started again as I left and made one last run for extra groceries. When I came home my neighbor was out sweeping her front porch and she expressed concern about whether we’d lose power. We’d had a taste of it the day before on Wednesday. The east wind came in overnight and blew out a transformer a couple streets over. We had two outages Wednesday due to winds and a downed tree on a power line. I said we have to hold the vision that we’ll keep power.
Tina, you obviously don’t know some of the unique things about Portland and why Saturday was so dangerous.
There is a little phenomenon here called the east wind. Portland is situated at the west end of the Columbia River Gorge.
In the summer and fall the east wind roars in from the gorge acting as an accelerant for wildfires in the Cascade Mountains. In the winter the east wind comes in meeting up with weather systems from the south creating hazardous hurricane force winds, ice storms, downed trees and dangerous conditions. This is not your average run of the mill 2 inch snowfall event.
What we had Saturday was 50 mile per hour winds in Portland coupled with temperatures 24 degrees below normal.
You may not have known all this in your hotel room but the next time you want to mock Portland weather because you had a cancel a show in the winter because of a 2 inch snowfall I want you to imagine this:
Imagine you’re in your house watching a giant cedar tree fall through your neighbor’s roof killing him.
Imagine you’re a Tina Fey fan getting stuck in an Amtrak train from Seattle to Portland trying to get to your show, hours and hours stuck and then the show is finally cancelled anyway.
Imagine you’re a Tina Fey fan with tickets to the early show but you’re being told to stay off the roads, the Max trains are shut down.. you can’t get to the show unless you risk getting stranded or worse on the roads and lose hundreds of dollars because the show was not cancelled.
Imagine you’re a mother with a baby in an apartment. You’ve lost power for over 24 hours and the baby is cold, you can see your breath in the apartment and the food you stocked up on is going bad and the power company has no estimate of power being back on.
Imagine you’re a school child on a school bus getting stuck in bad road conditions. You should have been home by 4 pm. but instead you finally get home at 11 at night.
Imagine you’re homeless living in an RV with 2 other people and someone lights a stove to try and stay warm and the RV catches fire and one person dies.
Imagine dying in your home of hypothermia because of the days long power outage in arctic temperatures.
Imagine hundreds and hundreds of trees down, many streets blocked, many power lines down, many trees falling and crashing through houses, destroying cars, trees with root systems weakened from months of drought last summer followed by several pineapple express rain events in December that loosened the roots and then this wind and ice storm taking aim. The trees didn’t stand a chance.
This is climate change. None of us can escape it. It’s here. Maybe think twice about mocking dangerous weather in a city you’re unfamiliar with?
We’re now on Day 5 of the main event. Fortunately so far our power has held but I realize all the things I should have prepared for that I never thought of. Like we need to get either a generator or a good size power pack that can be used indoors to keep the fridge going if need be. As of this morning there are still over 33,000 homes in Portland without power. On the weekend it was over 150,000. I need better boots with good traction for ice. We need to get chains for the car, just in case. This afternoon, there is a coming ice storm. Ice of up to 1/2 an inch expected in Portland and the Willamette Valley into Wednesday morning.
I need to bring my wild bird food inside because where I usually keep it, in the trunk of the car, is no good when the car gets frozen solid like it was Sunday.
This has been the worst winter event in Portland in 30 years.
At dusk last night and sunrise this morning we’ve had clear blue and pink skies but the East Wind is back, not as bad as Saturday but it’s blowing.
I was able to fill my re-fill my wild bird feeder and I’ve been on hummingbird duty all weekend rotating my two feeders out every hour or two because of the quick freezing.
A newspaper article stuck out to me from the Willamette Weekly newspaper: it said: “Top of Mount Tabor Destroyed by Downed Fir Trees.” At least six of those beautiful big Douglas Firs I walked through on Thursday came down in the Saturday storm.
Tina, I hope you get to visit Portland in better weather conditions.
I won’t be attending your show. I’ll be going to bed early so I can get up before dawn to watch the purple red sunrise over Mount Hood from the top of Mount Tabor.
