Snapshots from the storm that wouldn’t stop
Largest area snowfall in decades means a stalled city
L.E. BASKOW / Portland Tribune
People wait for a MAX train at Pioneer Place Monday afternoon as snow continued to fall on the city. This has been one of the largest snowstorms to hit the region in about 40 years.
Talk about memories frozen in time.
This was a week Portlanders will not soon forget.
As days of increasing snowfall, snarled traffic and closed businesses piled up on one another, city residents began questioning whether they were in the midst of a storm, or a siege.
The previous worst winter storm on record occurred in 1893, when 31 inches of snow fell in downtown Portland, according to the National Weather Service. In February 1950, 15 inches of snow fell in the Portland metro area over a 21-day period.
As of Tuesday, the weather service was calling this week’s accumulation at 12 inches. But it seemed like so much more. And more was on the way.
Storms may hit everybody all at once, but they leave everybody with their own little stories:
• At Legacy Emanuel Hospital and Health Center in North Portland, one physician discovered a number of her dialysis patients couldn’t get in to the hospital, so she set out on her own and picked them up herself.
• Oregon Health & Science University officials heard from one brain tumor patient who was heading home after treatment at the hospital. Her flight out had been cancelled and she was out of medication, but an OHSU employee made it out to the airport with the medicine Monday afternoon.
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• Empty OHSU hospital rooms and dental suites became bedrooms for nurses, many of whom stayed three or four nights without going home. Nurse Teresa Prichard worked and slept at the hospital two straight days before changing floors on Monday and giving birth to her own seven-pound, nine-ounce Kaden Prichard.
Nothing extraordinary, said Prichard’s husband, James Prichard. Kaden is the couple’s second child.
“Yeah, it wasn’t as big a deal the second time around,” he said.
• As if staff needed a jolt from any routine, workers at Legacy Emanuel were hit with a scheduled fire drill in the middle of the night Sunday — nobody had thought to call off the event.
• Buses, cars, planes and even MAX trains have been stalled all over the city, but one much-maligned mode of transportation came through: the aerial tram.
The tram, which extends from a streetcar stop in South Waterfront up to OHSU, helped the hospital keep running through the worst of the snow. With buses unable to make the trip up to Marquam Hill, OHSU kept the tram running until midnight so that patients and staff could get up to the hospital and back down the hill again.
“People (were) just so ecstatic to have at least one portion of their journey that didn’t take an hour or two,” said tram General Manager Mike Commissaris. “We just had a doctor from OHSU give us about 400 Christmas cookies. We don’t know what we’re going to do with all of them.”
• Most stores — especially outside the downtown core — either stayed closed or suffered a dramatic drop in business. But Bellagio’s Pizza in Goose Hollow was jam-packed with to-go orders every day since the storm started. Orders were out the door in an hour or two, even with fewer drivers on the job.
“We tell them we’ll get it there when we can,” said Kelly Haskell, a delivery driver. “People tend to be pretty patient; they know it’s better than nothing.”
• Tire shops also found the storm a boon to business, with snow tires and chains on everybody’s wish list.
“This was our best month ever in the shop’s 13 years,” said Mike McMillen owner of Affordable Tire and Brake Company on Southeast Hawthorne Street. “Everybody’s pretty happy and inundated.”
• TriMet cut back its bus service by Tuesday to just 27 routes maintained by the Oregon and Portland transportation departments. Major streets such as Sandy and Barbur boulevards were plowed, but most residential streets remained impassable to all but the most intrepid drivers.
Two MAX light rail lines were shut down — the Yellow Line between the Lloyd Center and the Expo Center along North Interstate Avenue and the Red Line between the Gateway Transit Mall and Portland International Airport. TriMet officials blamed frozen switch mechanisms that customarily allow trains to transfer between the lines.
• The Portland Office of Transportation estimates that clean-up costs could run about $1 million, which could deplete the city’s emergency reserve fund.
• Tony Lester, Multnomah County bridge maintenance supervisor, fielded a call Monday afternoon about a piece of rail hanging off the side of the Broadway Bridge. It was the third time in three days a motorist tore off a bridge railing by running into it.
At 1:15 a.m. Saturday, a taxi knocked out a rail on the Burnside Bridge. A little while later, a Vancouver motorist heading west on the Belmont ramp of the Morrison Bridge realized he was going the wrong way, hit his brakes and lost control of his car. The car propelled past the rail and landed 40 feet below on the sidewalk, upside down.
The man was later spotted by police, apparently unscathed.