The temperature at my wife’s house on Lutak Road reads two below zero, it’s snowing hard and that’s not the worst of it.
The worst of it is a prediction of rain on what Haines meteorologist Jim Green says is a downtown snowpack of 46 inches and what happens next as a result.
Sub-zero temperatures and heavy snowfall are two things aren’t supposed to happen at the same time around here but we’re living in the weather future we were warned about. It’s unpredictable when it’s not fatal.
A double tractor trailer is stranded out front. It tried to get up Lutak Road and started slipping on a surface that was polished ice before eight inches of snow fell last night. A front-end loader is attaching a chain to tow it into town.
No alarms are being sounded in this town partly because the old boys who control too much of its politics own heavy equipment and profit handsomely from weather extremes: Blizzard and flood control require handing them a lot of money.
If you’re interested in investing in the future of Haines, buy a backhoe or loader.
What’s coming at us today is the “Pineapple Express.” That’s the National Weather Service name for the warm, whirling dervish that spins off Hawaii toward Alaska each winter.
A satellite photo of the one that hit us in late November 2005 shows the tail of it hitting smack into Haines. Sections of Mud Bay and Lutak Roads literally washed into Lynn Canal. Landslides at 19 Mile and other locations closed Haines Highway for days.
People around town were tracking the tail of this one yesterday. It would hit Craig or Cordova, one guy said. You can watch the Pineapple Express on your cell phone. In the past 20 years, we’ve become so adept at tracking storms we can all play amateur meteorologist.
As kids, we played crack-the-whip on ice skates. When the whip got to swinging, the place you didn’t want to be was the end of the tail. There was no chance of hanging on.
The weather service is hedging on how much rain will come, but they are projecting temperatures of 36 degrees in two days.
As a result, there are only two kinds of people in our town right now: Ones who have shoveled their roofs and ones who are fretting about whether they built stoutly enough for their buildings to hold up four feet of snow, a foot or two more of fresh, wet stuff, plus rain on top.
Some rain will collapse some roofs. A lot of rain we dare not think about because our town was not built to those specifications, for that much rain falling on this much snow. Our storm drains and roadside ditches weren’t built to move that much water.
Our hills and mountains can’t absorb that much water, as we learned tragically last December.
Meanwhile, we are in the longest freeze the town has endured in decades. Over at the swimming pool, a door used by staff is jammed shut due to a frost heave. At the harbor, the unusually long cold snap helped cause the gangway to sink, temporarily cutting off access to much of our fishing fleet.
As a result of this most recent weather extreme, we’ve accrued new bills to pay and we’ll have more to pay when it’s over. Such extremes are our new reality. Haines saw record drought in 2018-19, record rain in 2020, and now is in a record-long cold snap that is pushing us toward record snowfall.
Here’s an idea: To help pay the bills the Haines Borough accrues due to extreme weather, the assembly could adopt a local sales tax on gasoline.
A tax on gasoline is appropriate because it’s our profligate burning of fossil fuels that got us into this mess, triggering a climate change that’s taxing us with extreme weather. We’re staring at a stack of bills caused by the burning of oil. A tax on gasoline would send those bills to the right place.
Meanwhile, the Haines Emergency Operation Center may as well stick around and someone there might think to phone Valdez, where giant snow dumps and rain have been the norm for decades, to learn how we might start to retrofit our infrastructure.