After more than a week of unusual weather patterns across the North Olympic Peninsula, this week’s warming weather trend will be more uniform.
Except for maybe a snow shower or, more likely, a mix of rain and snow today, the weather in the lowland areas of the Peninsula will be more normal for the end of December, the National Weather Service predicts.
Today should be fairly dry, said Johnny Burg, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Seattle.
Some early morning snow Wednesday through Friday will quickly become rain, Burg said.
But icy conditions will remain.
“All that snow and rain will freeze every night,” Burg said.
“That will create some very dicey conditions on Wednesday close to the evening commute — if there even is any kind of commute, because of Christmas Eve.
“Also, Christmas morning will have very icy conditions on the roads until the afternoon, when it is expected to be in the mid-30s.”
Uniform conditions
Burg said conditions should be close to uniform Peninsula-wide, and that areas south of the Strait of Juan de Fuca are likely to warm to the 40s by Saturday.
“I think we’ll see most of the snow melting away by this weekend,” Burg said.
Because there was little precipitation on Monday, road crews had a chance to plow most roads across the North Olympic Peninsula.
“I think most of the main roads have been reached by now, with just a few of the smaller tributary roads that haven’t been,” said Ross Tyler, Clallam County engineer.
Temperatures warmed to the mid-30s on Monday, allowing for slushy, mushy road conditions.
The slush was freezing up Monday night, creating ice on some roads.
“Every road should have seen the first run [Monday], but we’ll get the grater out on Tuesday,” he said.
“That is much, much slower, but it can cut through the ice and snow a lot better and get down to the pavement.”
West End complaints
Tyler said he had been inundated with calls from West End customers who wanted their roads plowed sooner.
“We are just not set up for heavy snow removal like some of the other areas of the nation or even state that have to deal with this on a more regular basis,” he said.
“We simply cannot afford to buy the equipment and have it mothballed for 11 months of the year for just one month where we maybe get slammed.”
Clallam County Public Utility District officials said about 400 customers lost power over the weekend.
“Most of the outages were one to about 30 customers,” said John Purvis, PUD distribution systems manager.
The major outages were on Hoko-Ozette Road, which had about 60 customers out of power from 2 p.m. on Sunday to 10 a.m. Monday.
The delay in restoring service was because the road hadn’t been plowed to gain access for repairs, Purvis said.
The Lake Pleasant area near Beaver had about 230 customers lose power from about 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m. on Sunday, Purvis said.
“We have been working hard to restore power to all customers,” he said.
By Monday afternoon, most customers’ power had been restored, and he predicted all would be by tonight.
East Jefferson County
In East Jefferson County, only a handful of customers lost power, said Roger Thompson, spokesman for Puget Sound Energy.
By Monday afternoon only one customer had not had power restored.
“Really, Kitsap County took the brunt of the outages in this storm,” Thompson said.
“We had a total of 9,000 customers lose power system-wide, and about two-thirds of those were in Kitsap County.
“It really missed Jefferson County, for the most part.”
But across the board power usage was up, he said.
“We have broken records on usage,” he said.
“We really hope people will start to use their furnaces efficiently.
“Even lowering the temperature and wearing a sweater can save a tremendous amount of energy.”
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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladailynews.com.
