At recently opened Sorenson Park in Felida, flocks of neighborhood children took advantage of their day off Thursday, chucking snowballs while sledding down the steep hill in the northeast corner of the park.
The hill, affectionately known as the Water Tower Hill for the gray towers at its summit, has been a staple of children’s winters for decades, long before the field was officially dedicated as a neighborhood park last weekend.
The patchy hill was more snow than grass Thursday afternoon, but children and parents took it in stride, displaying all the ingenuity of Western Washingtonians enjoying a rare snowfall.
Wind, snow, ice
The snow, preceded by strong winds that toppled trees and downed power lines, started falling about noon and tapered off after several hours before turning to freezing rain. Accumulations were relatively light, but they were enough to cause numerous spin-outs and crashes on county roadways and highways.
Storm warnings had prompted countywide school closures, and many government and business offices closed early as workers sought to avoid problems on the road.
As freezing rain settled in Thursday night, some school districts announced plans to delay school opening Friday morning. Others joined the list early Friday morning, with some delays and some outright closures. See
We’ll be updating the list of closures and delays in a separate story.
Traffic headaches
Slick roads caused a number of spin-outs, rollovers and other crashes Thursday, but traffic problems on the county’s highways were relatively mild, Washington State Patrol Trooper Will Finn said.
“I was actually quite surprised that it wasn’t worse,” he said. “Normally, in times like these, we are just slammed solid.”
None of the crashes troopers responded to involved significant injuries.
Finn attributed that to people being careful on the road and staying home if they could.
“There was never a time when every single trooper in the area was tied up, which is unheard of” during that kind of weather, Finn said.
Jeff Mize, spokesman for Clark County Public Works, said road crews’ ice mitigation efforts seemed to pay off and there was little for them to actually plow.
Conditions were so windy, and the snow so dry, a lot of it seemed to blow off the roads before it became a problem, he said. Even then, the heaviest snow accumulation he observed, even further north and at about one thousand feet, wasn’t much more than an inch or two.
Much of how today goes, he said, will depend on the temperature.
“If the temperature goes way down, we could have some real issues,” he said.
Forecasters at the National Weather Service expected less than an inch of snow and ice accumulation overnight before this morning.
Today, forecasters call for rain and pockets of freezing drizzle — with less than a tenth of an inch of new ice — in the Vancouver area, switching to rain as temperatures rise.
Rain is likely throughout the day, with the day’s predicted high at 44 degrees, with a low of 40 degrees tonight.
Snow day traditions
Back at Sorenson Park, Melissa Howell and her 8-year-old son, Jamison, scooted down the hill on the plastic lid of a storage container and a deflated inner tube left over from the summer’s outdoor activities. When all else failed, Jamison, a second-grader at Felida Elementary School, hurled himself down the hill, rolling through the puffs of snow.
“I went really fast,” a pink-faced Jamison said.
Denise Jacobs, 39, huddled with her 15-year-old daughter, Gwen Rowe, and her sweater-wearing dog, Gracie. Jacobs watched as her third-grade son, Alex, shared sleds with neighboring children.
Jacobs grew up in the neighborhood and recently returned after living in Seattle for 15 years. Jacobs recalled her own days sledding on the hill when it was still a cattle field and she and her friends had to scramble under an electric fence to reach it.
Avoiding the risk of shock was an improvement.
“Everybody around here knows you go up Water Tower hill and you sled,” Jacobs said.
