Are Seattleites "Snow Wimps?"

Many in the lowlands of Western Washington hope for at least one good snowstorm per winter to break up the rainy doldrums, and to let the kids have some winter fun.

And last week we got it!  Here's how things were looking around my house (about 40 miles north of Seattle)....

With MLK day last Monday, the kids got an entire week off of school. I mean, it just kept snowing. It stayed below freezing for an entire 5 days.

And then a little controversy ensued.

A reporter for the LA Times posted an article calling us wimps! Specifically, "Snow wimps: Seattle is shut down by first real snow of the season". Besides that rude headline, Kim Murphy wrote:

• Color Seattle clueless. The city has always marched unarmed into its infrequent battles with snow, and Wednesday's snowstorm was no exception.
• The snowstorm had been forecast to be the worst to hit the Puget Sound region in 30 years, an ominous warning that scared easily scareable Seattleites. 

The kicker to her comments is that she lives in Seattle. The biotch is a backstabber!

Art Thiel of KING5 News wrote a great rebuttall. He pointed out two important points to keep in mind about Seattle snow:

• No downtown that receives snow is as as hilly as Seattle. Period. The Priniciple of Verticality. There's just too much up here to get down safely.
• Wet snow doesn't drift. It gets compacted onto road beds and sidewalks. Plowing and salting helps, but 90 percent of the streets in a metro area as large as Seattle will never see a plow or a salting truck. Seattle cement can only wait for warm rain to wash most of it away.

Let me first admit something. I used to harbor similar feelings to Ms. Murphy's when I first moved back here after having lived in Lake Tahoe, which is over 6,000 feet above sea level and gets lots of snow every winter (except this winter, apparently). I graduated from South Tahoe High and you better believe me when I tell you the snow had to get pretty bad before they called off school. Because of my experience living in the mountains, I too thought Washingtonians were a little overly cautious when it comes to snow.

However, now that we're going through our 9th winter here, I understand the caution. The simple fact is, we are used to rain. Even wind and flooding. We're not used to snow. It doesn't snow here every single winter so we don't put snow preparedness things at the tippy-top of our city planning priorities. And frankly, these days, we simply do not have the money in our state budget.

And like Mr. Thiel pointed out, the snow we get here is the polar (polar, ha!) opposite of the snow Lake Tahoe gets. The variety of snow experienced in the Sierra Nevada mountains is the dry kind. It's not as heavy or sticky or slick.

For this chic to criticize how we handle our snow storms for the Los Angeles Times is ludicrous. LA has not a single leg to stand on when it comes to snow! The rain we're used to here in the Pacific Northwest causes all kinds of problems for the residents of Southern California when they get it. They encounter the same idiot, white-knuckle driving and increase in accidents during rain that we do during snow.

And excuse me, but if a portion of the 405 being shut down can be coined "Carmageddon", we deserve to refer to the storms we just had as "Snowmageddon". When the East Coast has a freaking earthquake they're allowed to freak out a little too. And by the way, I hear there were recently freezing temps in Florida! Shit happens. Ahem.

I just don't understand why she needed to write something critical. Why couldn't she simply report the facts?  She apparently complained on a radio show that her email inbox was being "abused". Aw, I wonder why?