Portland, Oregon Sees Snowiest Day Since WWII

And let's go ahead and talk about the same storm system that Steven was breaking down for you, already pummeling and taking its toll on the state of Oregon with heavy snow and even ice. It was a rough go of it yesterday. Even Portland International briefly had a ground stop. Joining us now, meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Portland, Colby Newman. Colby, good to see you, and thanks for joining us on what has been a snowy past 24 hours for Portland. We do want to start off with a little bit of video. There's cars that have been stranded on the side of the road in Portland unable to go anywhere.

It was a rough evening. What sort of unfolded there? Yeah, so we saw a snow start yesterday afternoon, and that's a recipe for a mess here in Portland. We just don't have the infrastructure to handle snow on the roads, and we have a lot of traffic already normally. And basically, the snow turned to a lot of slush, and then we had falling temperatures, and it turned to a sheet of ice on a lot of roads out there. And so there were a lot of cars out there that were unprepared. No, we didn't have chains or four-wheel drive, and they basically couldn't move because there was just the roads were covered in ice. And so you saw people abandoning cars, semis jackknifed and blocked entire freeways.

And we had people basically stranded in their cars through this afternoon along stretches of I-84 and I-205 just right here in the immediate Portland area. I mean, historic and significant storm, one that we're going to be talking about for years to come. And you had folks also getting out there this morning that didn't quite know what had happened. And I think that kind of contributed to the chaos on the roads because you already had some of those things piling up, and then they added to that mess. So trees falling down, that's the other part of this, not just the dangers on the roads, but also seeing some of these trees actually topple over with the weight of all that snow. Yeah. The Oregon coast actually ended up getting even, well, just as much snow as a lot of the Portland metro, and a lot of that snow fell without the wind that we had here in the metro.

And so the snow did pile up on the trees and has resulted in a bunch of highway closures sort of going between the Willamette Valley and the Oregon coast. So it's pretty unusual for us to be dealing with that. The winter of 2023, as we've understood, is unusual. So let's continue with it. How about those temperatures, Colby? I mean, cold enough to support one of the second snowiest days on record for Portland. Has these temperatures been unusual for you guys? Yeah. So I think this will be our second latest day that we will not made it to freezing in this late into the winter or this early into the spring, depending on how you defined late February.

But basically, it's not unheard of for us to be this cold in January, but by late February, we normally, we've only had one day later in the season where we've actually managed to not get to freezing. And today we're in the process of having that happen. And then tonight, we're in the running to set record low temperatures across most of Northwest Oregon and Southwest Washington. We're going to see temperatures drop into the teens, which will probably be a lot of locations will be the coldest that they've been all winter. So there goes any chance for melting. Hey, how big of a concern real quickly when it comes to any icy conditions with the cold sticking around? Yeah, it's a it's a big concern. I mean, the roads basically were packed down slush yesterday early on in the event.

And now they're just hard packed ice. And they did get a little bit of sunshine on some roads today that probably helped things melt out a bit. But with the cold temperatures staying below freezing, basically as soon as the sun drops a little bit in the horizon here over the next hour, we're going to see any water on roads immediately freeze and travel conditions to remain treacherous. Well, stay safe out there. I'll be Newman meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Portland. Appreciate your time coming on here to Fox Weather talking to us about that that historic snow yesterday. Yeah, thank you.

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