timlauer's photo on Instagram
timlauer's photo on Instagram
timlauer's photo on Instagram
For the most part winter in Portland means rain. Temperatures between the mid 30s and high 40s, and lots of grey sky and interesting clouds (I love the clouds in Oregon.) So when we do get snow it is special. The kids at school get excited, the adults too. Also, snow is often times followed by freezing rain, making walking, let alone driving, pretty treacherous.
Last Thursday snow was forecast in Portland, and sure enough it started to snow at my school around 10:30 am. With a significant amount forecast, my district made the decision to dismiss school at 1:00 pm. Our district uses a variety of tools to get information to parents. These include automated phone calls, automated email and texts, posts to the district web page, posts to the district Facebook page, and posts to Twitter, not to mention announcements on local legacy media. By 2:00 pm we only had 4 students still at school. By 3:30 all students had been picked up.
In total we got about 6 inches of snow. Anything over an inch will shut down the city, so you can imagine that over the weekend things slowed down quite a bit. Streets were turned into ski and sled runs.
Saturday night the temperature rose and the snow turned to freezing rain. Sunday we woke up to everything covered in ice. School was again called off on Monday. As I write this all major streets are clear pavement, but parking areas are still covered with snow, and most folks have not been able to clear their sidewalks. I can attest to the difficulty of chipping and clearing frozen snow.
No word yet on school on Tuesday, but I anticipate a possible late opening. I was out at school today and the side streets near the school are hard to pass.
Looking forward to the return of the rain later in the week...