NEWS | WEATHER
An estimated 230,000 customers initially lost power after last week’s historic windstorm. Tens of thousands were still left in the dark ahead of this week’s winter storm warning.
Sound and Fury A look at the record-setting storm that swept through the Inland Northwest BY MITCH RYALS
M
eteorologists knew it was coming for days before the record-setting windstorm whipped through the Inland Northwest. They saw the disparity in air pressure moving off the Pacific Ocean. Low pressure — typically associated with stormy weather — moved west to east toward southern British Columbia. High pressure, indicative of calm and sunny conditions, developed to the south of Washington over Oregon. They also knew about the jet stream — air moving at extremely high speeds tens of thousands of feet above our heads — and how it would push the storm across land, feeding it as it moved. And they knew about the cold front dragging close behind, another indicator of strong winds. “Wind is air trying to get from higher pressure to lower pressure,” says Andrew Kalin, meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Spokane. “So when you have a strong low pressure system, all that air wants to fill it.” All of those conditions converged last week to create
18 INLANDER NOVEMBER 26, 2015
a windstorm with gusts reaching 71 mph in Spokane, breaking the previous record of 67 mph in 1972 for non-thunderstorm winds. (The record for the strongest recorded thunderstorm winds in Spokane is 77 mph in June 2005.) As the disparity in pressure moved across land, it gathered strength, which is unusual, says Nic Loyd, a meteorologist at Washington State University. Typically, mountains disrupt a storm’s momentum on its way to Eastern Washington, but this time a powerful jet stream shoved it across the state, fueling the storm further. “All the factors that had to come together to produce the windstorm seemed to be converging at the right time,” says Loyd. “Typically [storms] are weakening when they get to us, but this one was strengthening as it moved toward Eastern Washington. That’s a rarity for storms in this part of the world.”
NATURE AND NURTURE
A painting of a tree with no leaves sits on the mantel overlooking the living room. Embers blink in the
YOUNG KWAK PHOTOS
fireplace below as Seamus Kinsella picks blankets and pillows up off the living room floor. He slept there, along with other family members, in the cold for the first few nights after the windstorm took his mother, Lea Anne Scott. She was killed Nov. 17 in her backyard when a tree snapped in half and fell on her. Kinsella, who lives in Portland now, grew up in the house on West 14th Avenue in Spokane. He remembers the painting above the mantel from his childhood. “Trees were a recurring theme in her work,” he says of his mother, a lifelong artist. Family and friends gathered there from out of state and stayed without electricity, surrounding themselves with Scott’s whimsical persona. The place is packed with her paintings and sculptures. Family photos fill a shelf in the living room, a huge stack of old newsLea Anne Scott, in an papers yellowed with age rests on a undated photo baby grand piano and painted blue lines scribble across the back of a pair of sliding doors that lead to the dining room. The lines seem random at first, but Kinsella explains that they’re actually tracings of light beaming in from the nearby window and reflecting off the door. “Whatever muse would strike her, that’s what would come out,” Kinsella says. “She took what she had and made it into something amazing.” But Scott’s presence is felt beyond the artifacts that hang from walls and sit on shelves. One could say the home itself is actually one giant piece of art. The staircase to the second floor faces a different direction than it did when Scott first bought the house, Kinsella says. Original hardwood floors and woodwork on the ceiling has been restored, and the backyard is