Snow Days in Spokane

Welcome.

This is the story of snow days 2008 in Spokane; a frontier community located in N.E. Washington state.

It begins with the first really serious snowfall, and the patently bizarre techniques used by the Spokane Street Department of removing it from the streets.

Now, it's been know for a long time that here in Spokane it snows in the winter. Sometimes it snows a little, and sometimes it snows a lot. Politicians and bureaucrats forget this, and some time back, after a winter of just a little snow, they dumped most of the fleet of road graders, in favor of fitting plows to the front of dump trucks. This was done because the trucks are, in their own words: "... much more beneficial to the citizens due to the fact they are able to complete their plowing operations in a fraction of the time that road graders would take for the same job."

Nevermind that residential roadways are reduced in usable width anywhere from 4 to 8-feet by the resulting berms of snow. Nevermind that the plows have to be moving at quite a clip to actually move the snow, and we all know that fast driving in residential areas is "... beneficial to the citizens..." Nevermind that the people often spend hours upon hours digging themselves out from the aftermath of these winter storms, only to find themselves victimized yet again, this time by plow drivers who are compelled by bureaucratic policy, who bury their cars and clog their driveways with compacted snow and ice, often in amounts far exceeding that which they had removed themselves earlier. Then, guess what? The politicans in the comminuty can't seem to understand why plow operators are threatened and harassed.

Why not use graders and avoid all the hassle? Again, in their own words: "When we used graders in the past they would leave the same berm at the side of the street but were able to 'gate' the snow at driveways, but the grading process takes much longer than truck plows, and graders have a higher frequency of breakdowns."

So, it's cheaper and more expedient to use the trucks, to say nothing about the added benefit of reducing the number of cars operated during the winter months by burying them in tons of ice and snow.

Zoning officials have a share in this nonsense too. They are the ones who have permitted multi-family conversions to single-family homes. That means that there are cars everywhere, in some of these neighborhoods. Visit the historic Brown's Addition in downtown Spokane the next time you are here. Not only are these historic homes trashed to make the rental multi's, they create a navigation nightmare in the neighborhood, especially in winter. This nightmare exists in virtually all the older parts of Spokane. Got a big house? Make it a multi, rent it, and ruin the neighborhood!