West Seattle, Washington
11 Thursday
According to the National Weather Service hourly temperature updates (KSEA is Sea-Tac, KBFI is Boeing Field, K91S is Alki Point but only shows windspeed, no temps; we’ll link to some personal weather stations later) — it’s about 80. Going for low 90s in the city but tomorrow’s in-city forecast alarmingly suggests possible upper 90s. Stay safe. For those of you pondering a movie to keep cool in those brutal early-evening hours, “Blades of Glory” at the Admiral at 6:45 pm might be just the ticket.
8:20 am, 70-plus degrees. Workers at Westwood Village Target are joking about someone interviewed on tv last night about how fast fans and air conditioning units are selling. They seem more impressed by how fast the interview went – five minutes distilled into five seconds.
At the front counter, a clerk is ringing up the first fan sale of the day. Out in the parking lot, closer to WaMu, a work crew is kicking up a dirt devil. And over Barton Street, looking east, the sun looks like 8 am Vegas more than 8 am Seattle:
Surely you’ve heard by now that the next couple of days will be ridiculously hot. That means discomfort will skyrocket with the temperatures, since most of us don’t have air conditioning and just aren’t acclimated to 90-plus degrees. But we don’t all have to pack ourselves onto the sands of Alki to stay cool. We thought it would be worth discussing alternatives in advance; for starters, we managed to cope with the last megahot spell by taking a late-afternoon walk through Schmitz Park (photo @ right). The trees of Lincoln Park, Camp Long, and other green zones in WS can do the same trick. (You can follow up a walk through LP with a dip in Colman Pool, which is open through the peak of the heat, till 7 pm.) Got a heat-beating tip to share with the rest of WSB-land?
Appropriate for this to show up on a day when a whole lot of rainbow-displaying was going on just a few miles away. Thanks to Christy from On Focus Photo for the pic, shot between Seacrest and Salty’s.
We all know that spring and early summer in Seattle can bring days interspersing sun and rain, but we can’t remember having seen it change quite as often and as dramatically as today … or perhaps the fact we were out on a very long walk from south WS to north WS heightened our experience … Here’s a photo from Alki during the 4 pm deluge (including a few hailstones too fleeting to catch with the camera):
… an hour or so after that evening cloudburst, this oddly creased cloud formation turned up in the eastern sky (view from Westwood). Can’t find any clue as to its meteorological backstory.
What a surprise to wake up to sunshine. Honestly, when we filed the post below, late last night, this page insisted we’d wake up to clouds and showers. Now it says “mostly sunny” all day. Glad they were wrong!
Now the National Weather Service thinks Monday will be sunny. Might just dare to haul the barbecue out of basement storage after all.
If you want to be ready for NEXT year’s windstorm, we saw a big pile of small generators @ the nearest Costco, less than $200 each.
When you hear “last December’s storm,” you probably think wind (and powerlessness). But some think first of the fast, furious rainstorm that preceded the wind, created the Upper Fauntleroy sinkhole (bridged but still not filled), and swept floodwater through some WS homes. The homeowners with flood damage are still trying to get things set right; one homeowner has e-mailed us to say they’re organizing a West Seattle flood victims’ group, plus warning us all to watch for what is alleged to be the real culprit in the spot flooding — filters left in storm drains by contractors and construction crews. Regarding the damage already done, they’re thinking about suing, and inviting anybody and everybody who had flood trouble to e-mail them at floodvictims@comcast.net.
The city says the grass ballfields are open again. Guess our spectacular sunny morning did the trick.
The city parks department has just issued an alert — it’s closing all grass ballfields around the city because they’re just too soggy, with rain most of the weekend and more on the way. That includes Alki, Fairmount, High Point, part of Hiawatha, Highland Park, Roxhill, and West Seattle Stadium, among others.
Haven’t seen it this windy in a while. Weather Service says Alki Point has gusts up to 43 mph. How are things where you are?
Though the North End is still a mess, looks like WS made it thru the night snow-free. No school changes either, except for a few Head Start programs to the north.
At least at our house … though Everett, Snoqualmie Pass, and other areas are getting snow-blasted. Let us know if you see WS snow!
28 mph wind at Alki Point as of a few minutes ago. Could get a little worse tonight, says the forecast. Put that flashlight by the pillow.
West Seattle Blogger Spouse reports street sweepers working Cali Ave much of the day, apparently tackling the sand from Snowpocalypse ’07. Glad to hear it, having recently been caught in clouds of dust kicked up by hill-climbing buses traveling over the street-side sandpiles!
If you managed to escape the slick commute early this am, you’re lucky — some of the streets on our end of WS looked almost as iced-over as during the height of the winterfest we “enjoyed” earlier this month. We mention this as an excuse to look ahead; the weather experts say tomorrow could be a rerun. (We need a better ice scraper.)
A friend of ours who grew up in a mountain state told us that you know you’ve REALLY gotten some snow when, days or weeks after it melts, dirty slushy piles of it are still lingering in parking lots and similar places. So, we can now officially declare our Snow-n-Ice-mare ’07 a REAL event, upon discovery today of the official Dirty Slushy Leftover Pile near the southwest edge of Westwood Village:
Interesting tidbit in this city press release, regarding what happens to all the sand dropped on the bridges and arterials, after the snow and ice becomes only a memory.
Looks like Seattle Public Schools decided to open 2 hours late today. That may even have been overly cautious, since it hasn’t even dropped below freezing yet (we can hear the snow from the roof melting slowly through the rain-gutter drainpipe), but better safe than sorry. For next time (somehow you know there’ll be one), a city source tells us that whenever Seattle Public Schools has a weather closure, there are “snow camps” for child care at Hiawatha and Southwest Community Centers. We can’t find details online but you can check with the centers: here’s contact info for Hiawatha and Southwest.
While Lady Liberty’s away, the snowpeople will play! (another Alki pic from Bob Bollen)
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