Big storm hits Alaska as weary residents dig out

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA– The worst winter anyone can remember in Alaska has piled snow so high people can’t see out the windows, kept a tanker in ice-choked waters from delivering fuel on time and turned snow-packed roofs into sled runs.

While most of the nation has gone without much seasonal snow, the state already known for winter is buried in weather that has dumped more than twice as much snow as usual on its largest city, brought out the National Guard and put a run on snow shovels.

As a Russian tanker crawled toward the iced-in coastal community of Nome to bring in much-needed fuel, weather-weary Alaskans awoke Thursday to more of the white stuff — more than a foot was expected to fall in Anchorage — and said enough was enough.

“The scary part is, we still have three more months to go,” said Kathryn Hawkins, a veterinarian who lives in the coastal community of Valdez, about 100 miles southeast of Anchorage. “I look out and go, ‘Oh my gosh, where can it all go?'”

The city has seen more than 26 feet of snowfall since November. Snow is piled 8 feet high outside Hawkins’ home and she can’t see out the front or back of her house. Her 12-year-old son has been sliding off the roof into the yard.

In the nearby fishing community of Cordova, the Alaska National Guard is out helping clear snow from streets and roofs. The city already been buried under 172 inches of snow since November; snow began falling again after midnight Wednesday.

“You actually get to a point where it almost becomes it’s expected, that it’s going to be snowing,” said Teresa Benson, a Cordova resident and district manager for the National Forest Service.

The city is struggling with a place to put the snow that has already fallen before dealing with more. Front-end loaders are taking scoop after scoop of snow from large dump piles to a snow-melting machine.

“That’s our big issue, getting our snow dumps cleared for the next barrage of snow,” Cordova spokesman Allen Marquette said.

More than 186 inches of snow has fallen in Cordova this season, including 59 inches for the first 10 days of January alone, according to the National Weather Service. The seasonal record of 221.5 inches was set in 1955-56.

Anchorage had 88 inches fall as of Thursday — more than twice the average snowfall of 30.1 inches for the same time period. The weather service counts July 1 through the end of June as a snow season.

This year’s total already broke the record 77.3 inches that fell during the same time period in the 1993-94 season, and another 3 inches has fallen since midnight Wednesday. If it keeps up, Anchorage is on track to have the snowiest winter ever, surpassing the previous record of 132.8 inches in 1954-55.

“Alaska is definitely getting the big dump,” said Bill Patzert, a climate expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.