Anchorage Daily News

A day after Anchorage endured one of the city’s heaviest one-day snowfalls on record, people spent what would normally be a spring Saturday digging out and slogging through nearly 2 feet of fresh snow and slush.

Click to enlarge

Story tools

Comments

E-mail a friend

Print

Digg this

Seed Newsvine

Send link via AIM

Font size : A | A | A

People who had planned to put on shorts and T-shirts for the popular annual Heart Run instead got out hats, gloves and boots and postholed through the snow. The race, like other events, was postponed. In a place that saw a run of blue-sky days in the 50s earlier in the week, it felt a bit like whiplash to look out the window. Some rejoiced, others cursed, many just threw up their hands and gave over to the oddity of it.

“Last night, I looked outside at 10 p.m. It was snowing AND light out,” said Kenny Hood, who was playing indoor hockey in South Anchorage. “It certainly does mess with your mind.”

The snowfall was the third-heaviest in a single day — measured midnight to midnight — since the National Weather Service started keeping records in Anchorage in 1915. Counting Saturday morning, 17 inches fell in West Anchorage and up to 22 inches in Muldoon. Between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Friday, snow fell at the rate of nearly 2 inches per hour, according to the weather service.

Before Friday, the most snow that had ever fallen in one day after April 1 was 8.3 inches. The day’s official tally at the airport: 15.5.

“Everyone’s grumpy,” said Trace Carlos, who had been looking at bicycles to buy and getting ready for his summer kite surfing. “We need summer, and old man winter comes along and gives us a big dump.”

DIGGING OUT

By afternoon, much of the snow on the major roads had been plowed or melted. In many neighborhoods, though, drivers had to practically swim through it, listening to the sound of the slush on their cars’ underbellies.

Juliana Jaroslaw took in her car Friday morning to have the studded tires switched over. She had started thinking about wearing flip-flops. “I hate it,” she said Saturday. “Everything now gets put on hold. My gardening. Everything.”

The snow bent tree branches, causing electricity outages affecting more than 2,500 customers of Municipal Light and Power and Chugach Electric Association.

Outages are par for the course in Alaska in the fall because snow accumulation snaps smaller branches and brings down lines, said Chugach Electric spokeswoman Patti Bogan. This much snow this time of year is highly unusual, though, and had the same effect, she said.

Letter carrier James Perry was delivering mail Saturday afternoon in the College Village neighborhood, trudging through the mess to get to mailboxes.

“You know,” he said. “People complain, but I ask them, ‘Where do you live?’ ”

And he sucked in his breath and released a long and slow, “Aaaalaaaska.” “Complaining about snow in Alaska is like complaining about the heat in Arizona,” he said.

PLANS CHANGED

In the same neighborhood, Gary Brell was plowing his driveway. He was supposed to spend the day installing a boat ramp in Soldotna but came home after reports from his wife that the house was buried in snow and they had already lost one tree.

“This is exactly like what happened six years ago,” he said, referring to the record storm in March 2002 that dumped 22 inches on the city in 24 hours. “And, just like then, this neighborhood has shut down.” In downtown Anchorage, tourist Stephen Ferry, from Washington, D.C., walked out of the Hotel Captain Cook in a T-shirt to smoke a cigarette. He had wanted to check out the Anchorage nightlife on Friday but stayed indoors. “I didn’t bring any boots with me,” he said, looking down at his canvas sneakers.

He might be marooned at the hotel for a while. To cross any street from the Captain Cook required leaping over gutter puddles of slush.

Find Megan Holland online at adn.com/contact/mholland or call 257-4343.

A late-season doozy

Anchorage was hammered by snow from Friday morning to early Saturday. Storm totals:

West Anchorage 16 inches

Hillside 18 to 20 inches

Muldoon 22 inches

It was the third biggest snowfall in a single day in Anchorage — midnight to midnight — since record-keeping began in 1915.

1. March 17, 2002 22 inches

2. Dec. 29, 1955 15.6 inches

3. April 25, 2008 15.5 inches

And it was by far the largest single-day snowfall after April 1 since 1915.

1. April 25, 2008 15.5 inches

2. April 2, 1955 8.3 inches

3. May 3, 2001 5 inches

Source: National Weather Service

Area snowfall totals

Storm totals as of Saturday morning as provided by the National Weather Service:

Skwentna 4.0 inches

Talkeetna 6.0 inches

Palmer F-Loop Rd. 9.0 inches

Wasilla 12.0 inches

Eagle River Valley 14.3 inches

Chulitna 15 inches

Sand Lake Road 17.2 inches

30th-Turnagain 17.5 inches

Lake Otis-Huffman 18.5 inches

Glenn Alps 19.0 inches

U. Hillside-Huff. 20.0 inches

NE Anchorage 22.0 inches