Distant friends sniggered at the name, “bomb cyclone,” as if we Seattleites were just being puerile drama queens. Toss in the “atmospheric river” label and folks were pretty sure we were making the whole thing up. We weren’t.
To be fair, both terms are relatively new. “Bomb cyclone” came into use in 2018, and the boffins at NOAA tell me it is “a fast-developing storm that occurs when atmospheric pressure drops at least 24 millibars over a 24-hour period.” Cool. (To us layfolk, it’s a windstorm.) The term “atmospheric river” is 0lder—from 1994, describing atmospheric water vapor that gets transported across the mid-latitudes—but here in Seattle it took quite a while for that term to replace our old name for the firehose of rain that comes to us from Hawai’i, i.e., the “Pineapple Express.”
In my four decades in the region, we’ve had both, and often. Windstorms come once or twice a year and are usually enjoyable (if you like watching nature do its thing in an obvious but not terribly threatening way). Now and again we’ll have a big blow, like the Inauguration Day Windstorm of 1993, which caused the death of six locals and left 600,000 homes without power, but they are (or, at least, were) rare. As for the Pineapple Express, it’s pretty much an annual thing, bringing weeks of rain, but during La Niña winters it doubles down and really gives us a wallop.
But both at the same time? Oy. I don’t care what you call them, when they both show up on our doorstep in the same week, we’re in for it.
And they both showed up on Tuesday.
Seattle is digging out from the first part of this storm’s one-two punch (the second part is due this evening). Around the Sound, trees came down—crushing vehicles and homes, killing two locals—and heavy limbs snapped off in the 60mph gusts, taking down electrical lines and leaving half a million without power for days; some are still in the dark.
We were without power for about three days—spared a third night in the dark when our power came back on late Thursday—and that is very unusual for our neighborhood. In our 25+ years here in this house, the longest power outage has been maybe fourteen hours, so spending fifty-plus hours without power, heat, and plentiful hot water was a definite outlier. Those who regularly experience long outages are better prepared than we were, with their generators and stocked-to-the-rafters pantries, but even so, we fared pretty well.
Heat was my major concern, as our supply of firewood was low at the start, and our fireplace is not very efficient. Still, it kept the front of the house at 60°F (15C) while the bedrooms were barely at 50°F (10C). It was smoky, to be sure, and by the end of the ordeal I felt like a brisket burnt end, but it was (obviously) survivable.
Second concern was food. Our fridge kept its cool, so we lost little by way of fresh food stores, but we did learn the extreme limitations of our little butane single-burner camp stove. It’s great if I want to char peppers outside, but it really goes through the fuel if you want to actually cook a meal (even if it’s tea and scrambled eggs). I had some emergency supply chests downstairs, but we didn’t have to break out the MREs (whew!).
Third on our list was power, to keep our phones charged (so we could stay in touch with neighbors and keep abreast of the power company’s restoration work) and to keep some decent light for the long November nights (it’s dark by 6PM). We have a collection of little power banks (including some solar-charged banks), but nothing like a generator or something that can run a refrigerator. We burned through them all by the last evening; we had options, like driving around in the car to charge our phones, but didn’t need to go that far.
I mention all of this because it brought into sharp focus just how dependent we are on our infrastructure and our technology. After three days, we were low on resources and scrambling for solutions. Some friends decamped and went to hotels. Some went to friends’ homes for some solace and warmth. But not everyone can (or is willing to) take advantage of such options. If we, who were relatively prepared (and frankly, for shorter outages, we’d have been just fine) were this uncomfortable and cold, I can only imagine how those with fewer resources at hand got through it (or are still going through it).
So my point (and I do have one) is this: if you haven’t already, give some thought to how you will manage a prolonged outage, be it of power, internet, water, etc. With the changing climate causing weather to become more extreme with each passing year, and with our infrastructure showing its cracks and our dependence on tech growing more integrated, such outages and their effects will become more frequent and more intense. We don’t have to look far to see situations where weather has damaged infrastructure so badly that it can take weeks (or months) for utilities to come back online. Just take Hurricane Helene is a case in point; parts of North Carolina still don’t have safe drinking water.
Make plans. Talk to your neighbors and friends. Compare notes. Learn what works and what doesn’t. Think about how you’d manage heating and food, primarily, but make sure your heating solution is safe (no hibachis in the house, please), and how you would prepare food for your family. Ensuring you have sufficient power supplies for tech should be next on the list, as hardly any of us still have landlines, and we get so much of our needed info from the internet that it’s really more important than ever.
Take care. Be safe.
k
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 