What was the worst winter in Spokane?
What was the worst winter in Spokane? Weather has been recorded in Spokane since 1888, but which winter was the coldest? The snowiest?
Read about some of the worst winters in this week's column.
An obvious mistake in the column, for which I take full responsibility, is that the winter ending in 2009 just barely surpassed the snowfall total of 1949-50 and I didn't catch it. But many remember 1968-69 as being pretty bad. And 1949-50 had some horrendous low temps, including at least on -22 reading.
This coming week, we're talking about manufactured gas in the Then and Now column. What is that, you ask? Before we learned to get natural gas out of the ground, gas used to fuel stoves, streetlights, hot water heaters and other things came from coal and, sometimes, from petroleum. The extraction process was laborious and smelly, but it produced something that could be piped to your kitchen range. It was invented in the 1700s, but only came into common use in the late 1800s and early 20th century. By the 1950s ended, manufactured gas was only a memory.
