Biggest snowfall in nearly three years doesn't stick around

By Seattle Times staff

	ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES Russell Giske, left, Abe Friedman and Clay Gordon each roll giant snowballs as they work to complete a fort at West Queen Anne Playfield.
	E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

Until then, forecasters predict on-again, off-again snow and rain showers with temperatures well above freezing, in the high 30s and low 40s.

By Sunday, a northern front is expected to blow in, bringing a severe chill. But it's going to be a dry spell, which probably means no new snow, said Allen Kam, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

On Tuesday night and yesterday morning, despite dozens of minor auto accidents, the snow turned out to be no big deal for city and state officials who had braced for the worst.

"The news is that there were so few problems," said Bob Jones, spokesman for the state Department of Transportation. "For us, no news is good news."

Late Tuesday night and into yesterday, a cold front blew through Western Washington and deposited 1 to 3 inches of snow on the greater Puget Sound area, the most to fall on local urban centers since February 2001, the weather service said.

	TOM REESE / THE SEATTLE TIMES Bijan Mohammadian, 14, takes a direct hit in a game with friends in West Seattle. Most Puget Sound areas received 1 to 3 inches of snow.

Seattle got about an inch. North Bend got about 3 inches.

In a suburban Bellevue neighborhood, children were sledding in the snow after midnight yesterday. Playful snowball fights broke out in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood.

At the Park at Bothell Landing, Mick Mathis spent yesterday morning shoveling slush off sidewalks and salting the path in front of the Northshore Adult Day Center.

"I grew up in Montana, so this is just a little splattering," said Mathis, a Bothell parks-maintenance worker. "But I can see why people here can get a little intimidated by it."

Yesterday morning, most commutes were mercifully hassle-free. Major highways and arterials were free of snow and ice by daybreak.

State Patrol troopers and local police officers reported dozens of minor snow-related accidents, spin-outs and cars in ditches, but the major snarls of past snowstorms were nonexistent.

Public-transportation authorities reported few problems, thanks in part to the fact that a lot of people were not working New Year's Eve. No major power failures were reported.

Western Washington could count its blessings.

In southwest Oregon, people were bracing for yet another blast of harsh weather like the kind that shut down Interstate 5 at the Oregon-California border and stranded motorists — without food, water or gasoline to keep cars warm — in the Siskiyou Mountains earlier this week.

The weather service was predicting heavy snow in the area again today and predicted dangerous driving conditions along I-5 between Ashland, Ore., and Mount Shasta City, Calif.

	STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Matthew Collins, trying to make the most of an inch of snow, gains enough speed to fly over a patch of gravel at the end of a grassy hill on Sunny Hills Elementary School in Sammamish.

In Seattle, city crews employed 30 trucks, 20 of them fitted with plows, to clear roads of snow or apply de-icing and anti-icing liquid and sand. Traffic signals on hills and steep grades were adjusted to minimize or eliminate the need for cars to stop.

Jones said there were 95 state transportation plows and 14 anti-icing trucks working Interstate 90, Highway 520 and the I-5 corridor from the Canadian border south to Pierce County.

State Patrol Lt. Kelly Quirin said the worst of the traffic backups — caused by dozens of minor accidents — were in Pierce and Thurston counties, at the Highway 101 junction with Interstate 5 in Olympia; along I-5 near the Nisqually River bridge; and on Highway 512 near Puyallup.

Metro Transit mechanics put chains on all 1,300 buses Tuesday night, in preparation for the snow, and shifted some routes to avoid certain hills, said Linda Thielke, a Metro spokeswoman. But it became clear by the morning that most buses didn't need the chains, and the routes were returned to normal, she said.

"We were prepared for the worst, and it served us well," Thielke said. "But the snow wasn't as intense as it could have been."

Seattle Public Utilities officials said garbage collectors should have reached every Wednesday-pickup customer by the end of yesterday. However, if anyone's trash wasn't picked up by 6 p.m., it should be taken off the curb until next week, said J. Paul Blake, a utilities spokesman.

No one will be charged for extra trash next Wednesday, he said.

Seattle Times staff reporters Michael Ko, Ian Ith, Sherry Grindeland, Lisa Heyamoto and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company