Trouble Piles Up in Snowbound Alaska

Until a couple of weeks ago, this was shaping up as a typical winter in Valdez, snow capital of Alaska. Eyeball-deep drifts. Kitchen windows half-buried in white. Snowbanks that turned streets into long white trenches.

Then it really started snowing.

By Saturday, after days and days of near-constant snowfall, the snowbanks in downtown Valdez stood 7 feet deep, snow was still coming down and another storm was expected in any time off the Gulf of Alaska.

“The snow is basically up to the bottom of your second-story window sills in a lot of places,” said Bert Cottle, the police chief.

The wet, heavy snow also threatens to cause roof cave-ins, which has prompted Valdez officials to warn residents to start shoveling. This weekend, snow shovelers were being hired as fast as they could be found. In three weeks, the prevailing wage for snow laborers had shot up from $7 an hour to nearly $20, residents said.

“I’m looking out the window,” Jack Chappel, manager of a Valdez gas station said in a telephone interview, “and every building I see except one has people on the roof removing snow.”

This is, after all, Alaska. Large quantities of snow are not unheard of. But in Valdez, where many of the 4,500 residents take pride in the fact that the town functions normally in more snow than practically any place else in America, this winter has been different.

The average snowfall in Valdez, from October to May, is 304 inches. That’s about 25 feet. By contrast, Mt. Shasta, Calif., gets about 9 feet. Anchorage gets nearly 6. Denver averages 5.

As of Saturday, Valdez had received 359 inches--30 feet--according to the National Weather Service office there. With at least another two months of winter remaining, the all-time Valdez snowfall record of 384.7 inches seems in grave danger.

Coming on the heels of the Exxon Valdez oil spill last March, and the subsequent months of chaos, the weather is making some residents edgy.

“Everybody’s really stressed out,” said Diane Skodinski, who works at a day-care center. “All you do is shovel snow.”

As she spoke, people were on the roof of the center, using a chain saw to cut snow into blocks to haul off.

“I’ve never lived any place where they had to use chain saws to cut the snow,” she said.

Valdez sits at sea level on a long fiord, beneath a wall of 5,000-foot mountains. The peaks help trap the storms and the snow falls and falls, said Tom Ward, a weather service forecaster.

Street signs all over Valdez are buried in snow drifts, and cars have collided because drivers could not see around corners, according to the police.

No one has been injured seriously.

“We did have an individual fall off a roof yesterday,” said Cottle, the police chief. “He wasn’t hurt very bad. When the snow’s 9 feet deep, there’s not very far to fall.”

The Valdez airport has been closed for nearly a week, leaving only one way out of town: A drive up a two-lane highway through a mountain pass that sometimes gets twice as much snow as Valdez.

Through the current deluge, Valdez has maintained its record for never closing schools because of snow. But some parents were a little leery of sending their children outdoors among the monster snow banks.

“I’ve thought about it,” said Doris Giusti, who has a 7-year-old daughter. “It’s not entirely impossible that she could hit a loose spot and just disappear.”