A4 The BulleTin • Thursday, January 13, 2022
WASHINGTON STATE
Town is running out of places
to put its record-breaking snowfall
BY DAVID GUTMAN • The seattle Times
LEAVENWORTH, Wash. — Do you have any extra
space? Would you like some snow? Leavenworth might be
in touch.
The faux-Bavarian alpine
town on the eastern slopes of
the Cascades was still strug-
gling to dig itself out Monday,
after more than 4 feet of snow
fell in less than 48 hours last
week, clogging streets, shut-
tering businesses and causing
fragile roofs to quake under
the weight.
Business owners and em-
ployees shoveled. Neighbors
offered snowblowers. The city
has been plowing and hauling
nearly 24 hours a day, for four
days. The National Guard ar-
rived Monday.
While the main streets are
plowed, some smaller roads
remain impassible. And when
4 feet falls all at once, it can’t
just be pushed aside. It needs
somewhere to go.
There is too much snow
in Leavenworth to simply
plow the streets. It needs to be
hauled away.
“It’s just getting it out of our
city,” said Leavenworth Mayor
Carl Florea, who declared a
state of emergency Friday after
the record-breaking snowfall.
“We’ve been dumping it in ev-
ery available open space, basi-
cally.”
The city has a small fleet of
plows, but they’ve had to hire
contractors to haul the snow
away.
“We’re a winter town. We
know that, so we’ve got plows
that can move a normal
amount of snow and get it off.
But when you get this much,
we do not have the equipment
to be able to remove snow,”
Florea said. “You worry about
how to pay for it later. You just
have to do it.”
They’ve been dumping in an
empty lot, behind one of the
town’s few traffic-lighted in-
tersections, and they’ve used
some land adjacent to the cem-
etery. They put as much as they
could behind Safeway.
On Monday afternoon,
the dump trucks were bound
for the city boat ramp, on the
banks of the Wenatchee River.
The parking lot there looks like
a big ice rink, ringed by 15-foot
snow walls. The dump trucks
unload near those walls. An-
other front loader pushes the
freshly arrived mounds. The
walls climb higher. The snow
tumbles back down.
It is at once necessary and
Sisyphean. It’s keeping the
dumping grounds accessible
and organized. But the snow
just keeps tumbling down.
Two blocks in the other di-
rection from the school district
headquarters, four National
Guard members are wielding
snow shovels. They scoop and
hack and ax and throw, work-
ing their way though about 50
feet of what snow aficionados
call Cascade concrete. They’re
trying to clear a path from the
street to the front door of a
home.
An elderly man contacted
the city, asking for help.
“Thank you gentlemen,” he
said, as he watched, smoking a
cigarette.
Brown again deploys state
National Guard to hospitals
associated Press
SALEM — Gov. Kate Brown
is deploying Oregon National
Guard members to help at
hospitals that she says are un-
der extreme pressure due to
a COVID-19 omicron-fueled
surge in hospitalizations.
A total of 1,200 Guard
members will be deployed to
more than 50 hospitals across
the state, KATU-TV reported.
“Fueled by the Omicron
variant, current hospitaliza-
tions are over 700 and daily
COVID-19 case counts are
alarmingly high,” she said on
Twitter, thanking Guard mem-
bers, their families and their
employers for this sacrifice
and support.
“As they step up yet again,
I am asking all Oregonians to
continue to do your part. Get
vaccinated, get boosted, wear
your masks, and stay home
when you are sick,” Brown
said.
The Oregon Health Au-
thority on Wednesday re-
ported 47,272 new cases
of COVID-19 from Jan. 3
through Jan. 9. That number
is nearly six times higher than
two weeks ago and three times
higher than the August 2021
previous pandemic record
for weekly cases, according to
health officials.
There were also 486 new
COVID-19-related hospital-
izations last week, which is a
68% increase from the previ-
ous week, health officials said.
Photos by Jennifer Buchanan/
seattle Times via Tns
Capt. Luis Torres wades through
the snow after knocking on the
door of a house Monday in Leav-
enworth, Washington. The Na-
tional Guard was dispatched to
the city to assist in the dig-out.
Tourists cross Front Street on Monday. Feet of snow buried Leaven-
worth after a winter storm roared through Washington, closing all four
main mountain passes.
The National Guard is not
really here to shovel. They’re
doing welfare checks. About
two dozen soldiers are going
door-to-door, to people who
asked for help, but also just
visiting homes that look like
they could use a check-in.
They knock, ask if every-
one is doing OK. Are people
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Arrangements: Nis-
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Home is honored to serve
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Please visit the online reg-
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January 15, at 2:00 pm
Contributions may be
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warm, do they have enough
food? They could be here up
to a week.
“Their primary mission
isn’t to shovel driveways. It’s
to make sure people are safe,”
said Capt. Luis Torres, of the
Washington Army National
Guard.
On Front Street, down-
town Leavenworth’s main
drag, visitors are trickling back
out. Pedestrians are shuffling
warily along the slick pave-
ment. Those trapped here over
the weekend, after the storm
closed all of Washington’s
mountain passes — the first
time that’s happened in recent
memory — have cleared out.
Highway 2 through Stevens
Pass remained closed Monday,
with crews working toward a
Wednesday reopening.
Sausages are grilling, kids are
sledding, shops are opening.
Kevin Winters spent the
last several days “just moving
snow.” He’s a chiropractor, but
he lives out on a pear orchard
and he’s got a plow blade on his
Dodge Ram 2500. His county
road a couple miles east of
town hadn’t been plowed, so he
took it upon himself.
At some point, though, the
pickup with the plow started to
become less useful and he be-
gan relying on his tractor that’s
got a snowblower attachment.
“What a plow does, is it
pushes,” Winters said. “But a
snowblower will toss it wher-
ever you direct the shoot.”
On Monday morning, he
headed to the home of some
friends to help clear them out.
They’re on vacation. He wryly
noted the irony of their desti-
nation as he departed.
“Anyway, I’ve got to go to the
Maui house and plow it out,”
he said.
Bonnie Kinnear made it
the 2 miles from her home to
her downtown gallery for the
first time since Thursday. She’d
spent the weekend digging out
her own house. Her husband,
who works for the Washington
State Department of Trans-
portation, has been helping to
clear the still-shuttered High-
way 2.
Now she cleared the side-
walk in front of her Metal Wa-
terfall Gallery. Then she dug
out the fire hydrant next door
and cleared a path between it
and the street. You never know.
“It’s been an all-hands-on-
deck situation,” Kinnear said.
But she was encountering
the same issues, on a much
smaller scale, as the city, as the
plows and the front-loaders.
“It’s crazy,” she said. “There’s
just nowhere to put the snow.”