More Reasons to Love the Sounders, Soccer
Seattlest Pix 09Nov20
Friendly Folk-Pop for the Kids: Hey Marseilles at Vera This Saturday
Excavator Rampage in Stanwood
Can't Miss It: Weekend Edition Nov 20-22
"Isn't it so nice and cool today?" the woman behind the grocery counter said yesterday. The temperature had pushed up to the low 80s. Any other summer, that would qualify as a seasonal high and would probably draw complaints of too much damn heat. But after last week's furnace hot weather, definitions of what constitutes hot, at least in the short run, have changed.
When you are caught up a natural disaster, you are just trying to survive it. You haven’t got the energy to mark it down as historic. Later, the changes an event like that makes in your life are sometimes hard to grasp. Accepting 80-degree days as cool is just a subtle change. There are others.
Make no mistake about it. Last week was an epic event. Meteorologists dutifully tracked the temperatures that peaked a week ago at an unheard of 103. But that's just numbers. To anyone that went through Seattle's hottest week since records started being kept, it was more than memorable. It was unforgettable.
On that 103-degree Wednesday, you could feel the day’s importance as it crept along. We woke up to 80-degree weather and it just kept building. Cliff Mass over at UW was writing on his blog with a giddy awe. It was going to be something, he said, we will want to tell our grandchildren.
Walking around the University Village, a young guy, probably a student at the U, had an odd defiance. "Bring it on," he said. "If I'm going to be this miserable, I want the record."
People tried anything to cool down. A neighbor spent an hour driving a car around the block to keep her infant daughter cool. Some kids fill a plastic pool with ice and screamed with delight as they jumped in. Some neighbor kids lined up to get sprayed by a hose, but recoiled when the water came out hot; the water in the hose had been soaking in the sun.
Local hotels and motels filled up as people rented AC when they couldn’t buy a home unit anywhere in town, even though they waited in long lines all day just for the chance of one.
People questioned why more Seattle homes and businesses don't have AC, but if you were here last summer, or 2005, you know why. Rare is the summer with a 90-degree day. Last year, we barely got to the 80s and 2005 was even cooler. Investments in infrastructure like AC units demands some frequency of use. In Seattle, AC is a luxury, sure, but it's also liable to draw neighborly laughs and comments that you aren't really Seattle. Building an ark on your lawn would draw similar comments.
Some lucky people moved from an air-conditioned office to an air-conditioned car and air-conditioned home. But the heat had an effect on them, too. Car ACs had trouble keeping up in cars stuck in traffic on asphalt and concrete road. At home, the heat had imprisoned them, in some cases to the single room that had the one AC unit.
Cases of heat stroke spiked as expected, but many people mentioned to us that the heat was making them nauseated, tired, and dizzy. One person said they went to the park to read under the shade of a tree, but the air was so super-heated, the shade made no difference.
Pets got it worse, and it was not unusual to see dogs and cats simply lying down in the shade not moving.
At a local Red Robin, a harried manger answered the phone, "Yes, we have AC, but it’s not working very well. The temperature is around 83." She probably didn’t realize it was working fine; the temp outside was twenty degrees hotter. The place was jammed and the menu item of choice was any crushed ice drink.
The city put up cooling stations that freakishly called up memories of that great old sci-fi movie The Day the Earth Caught Fire and that bizarre Twilight Zone episode called "Midnight Sun" where a woman faces a burning world that’s moving closer to the sun, only to wake up and find herself in a freezing world moving away from the sun. Seattleites may have hoped for such an ironic twist, but it never came. It was still 100 degrees around 9 p.m.
People were quick to point to global warming as a cause, just at anti-global warming advocates seized on last December's snowstorms as proof that the world wasn't heating up. Long term weather trends can't be judged by single events. Last week's heatwave was not proof of a warming world. It was a freak occurrence, a coming together of conditions that caused a record spike in the temperature.
At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the last four years have brought record-setting weather events. Two hellacious rainstorms, a record series of snowstorms, and now 103 degrees. Our weather has been on a bender.
Finally, last week was a leveler for those recent arrivals to our city who were anxious about introducing themselves as new residents. No worries now. If you were here last Wednesday, you were part of a community experience that indemnifies you from xenophobic locals. "Yeah, I wasn’t born here, but I was here on July 29, 2009, so back off."
Today's high is expected to be 79, and we're nowhere near that as of now. Isn't it nice to be so cool?
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
ah, those were the days. Good times. I'm nostalgic already.