Snapshots from the storm that wouldn’t stop

Largest area snowfall in decades means a stalled city

By Staff Writers

The Portland Tribune, Dec 25, 2008, Updated Jan 4, 2010 (8 Reader comments)

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.

• 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.

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