Results tagged “snow”

• Seattle Transit Blog is mad as hell about the legislature backing out on I-90 light rail funding and they don't think you should take it anymore. East side! West side! Let's make a light rail rumble!
• Will fancy eats joint Sitka & Spruce really move from Eastlake to Capitol Hill? CHS polls readers, fans flames of rumor.
• Publicola's Morning Fizz abandoned links and announced that a "dynamic woman" had joined the Mayoral race. April Fools!

It's snowing like hell near Microsoft, Wedgwood has sun and blue skies, Capitol Hill has sunbreaks and winds, and Shoreline was getting pelted by snow pellets. Of course, that was five minutes ago, so by now the opposite could be true in every case. We keep looking out the window and thinking it's either late December or April. But that's March for you. Meanwhile Metro's list of impacted buses is growing.

You may have noticed the snow flurries yesterday and this morning. Were you psyched about them? Even after Snowmaggedon '09, Seattlest can't seem to kick that momentary, childlike thrill when we see flakes drifting from the sky--but trust us, the thrill fades ever more quickly with each snowfall this year. According to Weather Underground, we're doomed to snow here and there throughout the day, but tomorrow looks clear and sunny. We're on a Winter Weather Advisory until Tuesday. Our weather guru, Cliff Mass, says "an inch or two is possible," and that "this really is quite extraordinary." Mmhmm. All we know is that the weather has us swapping tall tales about early summer blizzards with friends who've also done time in the Midwest.

• Big Blog won points with a post about The Bachelor's ex-wife and her YouTubed guest spot as a groupie on local band Out From Underneath's Seattle-heavy music video. Onwards and upwards, Gas Works Park.
• The blog formerly known as bigasscity is quoting none other than ZZ Top while crunching the numbers about Metro's projected budget shortfall and how much money the city could have saved by rejecting the bored tunnel viaduct replacement option.
• Cliff Mass thinks it's "pretty definite": we're looking at more snow, probably on Sunday. Actually, that works well with our schedule. How kind of the gods to check with Seattlest HQ's Google Calendar before sending the cold front!

That's what we hear from KIRO 7, anyway. Cliff Mass says the convergence zone--our nemesis!--is creating snow conditions above 500 feet. But wait! There's more! After a sunny Friday, a cold front moves in courtesy of our Canadian "friends," and on Sunday "the models are insistent about the creation of a Puget Sound convergence zone...and if they are right it will be cold enough for snow." Also, the temperatures might get down into the 20s for a few nights. What's that noise Sideshow Bob makes when a rake smacks him in the face? Yeah, we're making that noise.

At about 6:50 this morning, Metro's bus tracking service crashed, which meant that MyBus and OneBusAway were not delivering fresh data. Meteorologist Cliff Mass was having none of it, and made a call: "They promised that they are going to replace the servers of the bus track information system and this problem, which inconveniences hundreds or thousands of us unnecessarily, will be taken care of during the next month or so." Metro's press release sounds appropriately chastened: "Metro is already looking to next season by pursuing additional steps that can be taken to keep riders better informed of transit disruptions. Those actions include: redesigning elements of the Metro Online website; beefing up emergency event staffing plans for the Customer Information Office; adding additional staff to track and post bus reroute and service disruptions online; and exploring the use of emerging public communication tools to help disseminate information." Ooh, exploring! That's like when you get on a bus operating on an unpublished reroute!

Is your coffee cup half-empty yet? Krispy Kreme is selling a 16-ounce drip for a dime, which may be good news for those Microsoft temps getting a 10 percent pay cut. That's 40,000 grumpy Microserfs temporary workers, if you're counting. Is this why Washington is Number Two in bankruptcy growth? Even Lucy, the famous Ethiopian fossil (no really, she's old) isn't making money. Her last day at the Pacific Science Center is March 8. The snow isn't sticking around either, but you're probably okay with that.

UW atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass became a local internet celebrity seemingly overnight during last year's Snowmageddon, when he was forecasting weather in circles around all the other so-called weathermen. In addition to his blog, he's got a book, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, that came out last fall. His next lecture, "The Secrets of Northwest Weather Prediction," is tomorrow night at Town Hall (7:30 p.m.). Tickets are $5.

If there's any good news in this, it's for skiers and snowboarders--Cliff Mass expects "1-2 feet snowfall at pass level and above by Friday." But he also says that despite considerable uncertainty in the models, there's perhaps a 50-60 percent chance of snow on Thursday morning. This is due to a cold front to arrive Wednesday night, an "upper trough," and that damn convergence zone. Stay tuned for our interview with Mass later this afternoon!

Yes, it's snowing again, though at least downtown, it's not sticking--but it's still enough for the fools to use their umbrellas. Thankfully, the precipitation should turn to rain later today. If you ski or snowboard, you might want to take a sick day soon: between 8 and 16 inches of snow are forecast for the Olympics today, while the Cascade passes may get 3 to 9 inches of new snow. This should be the end of winter for now: forecasters are predicting mostly cloudy but dry conditions on Wednesday, followed by partly sunny skies on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday with daytime highs in the mid-40s.

Seattlest looked up at a snow-covered skylight and wondered whether anyone would catch their bus. Sure enough, some are running late. Good thing we went to REI on December 26 and scored some of these.

We can't help but laugh at the news from snowed-in London, especially this bit: "As London ground to a virtual standstill Mayor Boris Johnson also faced questions over the inability of the capital's infrastructure to cope with six inches of snow. Mr Johnson admitted London did not have enough snow ploughs to keep the roads clear and defended the decision to suspend all bus services, which left thousands of angry commuters stranded." Seems like Seattle's Mayor Nickels could provide some detailed messaging help for Boris Johnson on 6-inch snowfalls, a paucity of snow plows, and suspended transit.

Last night--see Exhibit A, to the right--we walked home in a snow flurry. This morning it's 25 degrees and sunny. Tomorrow, says Cliff Mass, it's back to a rainy gray: "Temps will warm rapidly as the associated front approaches and there should be considerable rain shadowing from Seattle northward. So it is possible that some locations will initially see some snow (particularly south Tacoma) that will turn to rain."

If I was a bear and a big bear too, I wouldn't care much if it froze or snew. But we're not Pooh-bears, we're Seattleites (and Seattlests), and the fact is, our city failed us, failed miserably last month. Ace-of-Grace Crunican, nominally in charge of Seattle streets, actually left town during the height of the storm. Spacey Kevin Desmond, nominally in charge of Metro, went ten days without phoning back to ask SDOT whazzup wid da snowplowz, guys? Clowns, all of them. Most of us came to Seattle because it's a decent place to live, drawbacks of climate aside. We put up with crappy weather half the year and year-round provincialism in exchange for clean air, clean water, clean government. We don't expect betrayal at the hands of incompetent bureaucrats.

Yesterday we posted about Metro's route status updates and suggested you check their adverse weather page for the latest news. Funny story there. We'd walked past a rerouted 10 bus on Broadway--a big branch fell on the bus lines on 15th Avenue East on Sunday night--on the way in to work, but when we checked Metro's page, there was no mention of that reroute. Maybe they already fixed the lines, we thought. But after lunch we spied a 10 bus on Broadway again, so we asked the driver how long his Broadway holiday excursion was going to last. "You know, I haven't heard anything at all on the radio all morning," he told us. "I'm just going to keep driving until someone tells me something."

For all those who feel they must leave their cozy beds this morning and brave the Metro wilds, the latest updates on snow-impacted bus routes can be found on the Ice & Snow page of Metro's website. Routes 1, 5, 7, 17, 18, 26, 27, 28, 42, 48, 73, 148, 175, 255 and 355 are currently affected. [Ed. note: We walked past the Metro 10 bus on its Broadway reroute this morning at 9 a.m., but can't find it listed now on the Metro adverse weather page Katelyn mentioned--so maybe it's back to running down 15th. Maybe not.]

• Looks like the Rainier Valley Post has classifieds, now. We love seeing all the ways neighborhood blogs are connecting people to those around them, and introducing classifieds as a way of communicating about local resources is kind of brilliant in a year when jobs promise to be scarce and money scarcer.
• Seattlest MvB and CHSer JSeattle collaborated last night to bring you breaking (hah!) news about a fallen branch on a 15th Avenue power line. Photo included, for which we hear MvB sold the rights at $3, down from an initial bargaining price of $10,000.Capitol Hill wasn't the only neighborhood having problems with power. West Seattle Blog reports an overnight storm-related power outage about seven hours long at their HQ. Good thing they had stockpiled MacBook batteries!
• Irate commenters will be glad to hear that the City of Seattle jumped to use salt on the city's streets during the snowstorm last night. Seattle 911 has the details.

      

It was freezing rain at about 5:30 p.m. on Sunday night. We walked home from the grocery store fairly pleased at having dodged a snowy bullet. But by 7 p.m. there were two inches on the ground and more on the way. So we laced up the snow boots and headed out for a look around Capitol Hill. Our major takeaway is that snow remains slippery stuff. Seattle DOT had 16 snow plows out by about 9 p.m., with a total of 24 expected to hit the streets tonight. We're still expecting rising temperatures and rain overnight, so at the very least it should be a wet Monday morning.

We had a server snafu earlier this morning, which kiboshed our Neighborhood News roundup. Here's a summary version: that student who was shot to death while wearing a Nazi uniform was a UW German Studies major, even in this real estate market, someone still wants to kick the B&O out in favor of a 75-unit apartment complex, and Cliff Mass says probably no snow today, but watch out for tomorrow. Has your Zune started working again? Meanwhile, most of our secondary pages are still offline, and we're still experiencing some "server optimization" issues with commenting login times. If you have particular difficulties with anything, shoot us an email at tips (at) seattlest dot com. And Happy 2009!

Congratulations! You had a great year, didn't you? You went on that cool vacation, ate at that new restaurant, went to see that really good band play. You played in the snow and pet a dog or two. You either kept your job or lost it but, either way, that made headlines. You elected a new president all by yourself. Yesterday, Dwight Pelz emailed to call you the Democrat of the Year. Now, here on Seattlest, you're being named the Seattlest Reader of the Year. It doesn't get much better than that, does it? (Okay, it's no "Time Person of the Year," but so what?) Where else is there to go but up? Go out and treat yourself tonight, reader. You're the best.

Sounds like the city is listening, after all. At a press conference this afternoon, Nickels announced changes to the official no-salt policy: in some, limited circumstances, salt will be used on the streets of Seattle to make life easier in the snow. We thought this day would never come. In addition, the city is looking into giving rebates to residents whose trash pick-up was skipped two weeks in a row. When more information is available, we'll post it!

We realize plenty of people are still steamed about the loss of our public transportation system during the recent snow and, currently, during the widely celebrated "It's almost New Year's Eve" holidays. Most of you are probably at home right now, sipping hot cocoa. Enjoy it! It's the holidays!

Via WSDOT's Twitter, we hear that a winter storm watch predicts two feet of new snow for the Cascades by tomorrow evening. Not coincidentally, Stevens Pass will be closed for 20 minutes Wednesday "sometime between 8 a.m. and noon"--sounds like they're sending Comcast out--for avalanche preparedness work. It's always good to be prepared for avalanches, because otherwise people die. Alpental is reporting a 74-inch base up top--that's crazy. Two weeks ago they didn't have a base.

It's a Seattlest special report...from the future! We sent Editor Emeritus Seth Kolloen into 2009--let's face it, he's not getting much done the rest of 2008 besides raiding our liquor cabinet and shooting at "squirrels" who "looked at him funny." Just like Martin Sheen at the start of Apocalypse Now, we hadda send him upriver.

It's below zero in Fargo, North Dakota. Are they complaining? No! Instead, they are laughing at us. Specifically, the Fargo Microsoft employees are laughing at their counterparts here in Washington for being wimps. Here's an excerpt from the Fargo campus' email alert to employees this week, taken from Old New Thing via the P-I's Microsoft Blog:

Other Advisory Notes:

Continue reading "Microsofties In Fargo Get Punchy"

Seattleites are so upset by the way the city has handled the recent snowfall that they are...gosh!...it's just...where are our buses! Damnit, we're forming a Facebook group over this! Meanwhile, over in Spokane, the City Hall was shot at six times over the weekend, the bullets leaving 2- to 6-inch holes in the windowpanes. On Tuesday, a guy stormed out of his house with a gun and threatened a snowplow driver if he blocked him in. Then he called the city and told them any snowplow that came down his street would be shot. Now that beats an intemperate letter to the editor.

With a pre-emptive sigh of despair, we hit "refresh" on the Seattle Weather site this evening...only to find exactly what we had feared: another winter weather advisory is in effect for the Seattle area, starting tonight at midnight and lasting until Christmas morning around 4 a.m. Joybells! For those of you who are still enthused about that slimy gray cold substance that keeps managing to find its way into our tennis shoes as we go about our daily business, please fax us some of your excitement at 1-800-WHO-FAXES.