This Winter Didn’t Wait For Solstice City Snow Removal Over Budget Before Winter Even Begins

The calendar may say it’s the last day of autumn today, but the weather couldn’t be more like winter.

Nearly 40 inches of snow already have fallen in Spokane this season. Normal snowfall for an entire winter is 50 inches.

“Winter is happening,” Todd Carter, forecaster for the National Weather Service in Spokane, said Thursday.

Road crews are working around the clock, and retailers quickly are selling their usual winter supplies.

Forecasters say more snow is on the way this weekend, and with the continuing cold, it’s a virtual certainty Christmas will be white.

Winter officially will begin at 6:07 a.m. Saturday when the sun reaches its lowest point in the sky of the Northern Hemisphere, an event known as the winter solstice.

Early winters are not unheard of in the Inland Northwest, but this year’s has been earlier and harder than most.

The paralyzing ice storm on Nov. 19 set the pattern even before all the leaves had fallen from the trees.

Already, the city is expecting a $300,000 budget overrun for snow removal, and crews had been working almost non-stop before the sun came out earlier this week, said Larry Neil, street maintenance supervisor.

While the temperature dipped to 1 degree in Spokane on Tuesday, overnight shelter operators said they aren’t getting a big influx of new residents.

But that will happen when the wind chill factor drops below zero, said Phil Altmeyer, director at the Union Gospel Mission.

Across the region, stores are scrambling to keep stocks of sought-after items such as ice scrapers, snow blowers and sleds.

Many hardware stores are fully stocked, but the supplies often sell quickly after they are put on the shelves, store operators said.

“Once we get it, it’s a couple of days, then we’re out of it,” said Chad Jensen, a sales associate in the Sears hardware department in Coeur d’Alene. “Tow ropes, we’re completely out of. This happens just about every year.”

Though the store still has a few snow blowers, “they’ll be gone by the end of the week,” Jensen predicted.

The snow blower supply also was running low in Spokane. At Stewart’s True Value Hardware on North Monroe, co-owner Daun Czechowski said she’d sold more snow blowers this year than in the previous two years combined. Though fully stocked with ice scrapers and de-icer, she was having trouble stocking snow shovels.

“We’d feel more comfortable with a few more shovels than we have, but my truck’ll be in tomorrow,” she said. “Our warehouse is not as up to snuff as we’d like it to be.”

Likewise in Post Falls.

“That’s it on snow blowers,” said Doris Schoenberg, a clerk at Post Falls Hardware.

At Perfection Tire in Post Falls, the winter supply of regular snow tires has hit the road.

“We’ve been sold out for at least three weeks,” said Mike Brewer, the service manager at Perfection. “Most everyone’s out in a lot of sizes.

Still, Brewer said, the store has a good supply of studded tires.

Other tire sellers said their years of experience have taught them to stock for a blizzard of sales.

“We realize our season is just beginning,” said Dennis Wallingford, the manager at Les Schwab on Northwest Boulevard in Spokane.

On Spokane streets, two 14-member crews are working day and night, applying liquid de-icer and light coats of sand to hilly areas, city officials said.

If heavy snow falls, extra crews can be called for a “condition red,” a full-scale plowing and de-icing operation, said Neil.

Recently, the street maintenance department came close to exhausting its 1996 budget, and was given an extra $300,000 from the reserve fund to continue operations through the end of the year. Neil said he may not spend all of that money.

Forecasters on Thursday issued a snow advisory for up to 3 inches by this morning, with heavier amounts in the mountains.

They said periods of snow are expected through the weekend, especially in the mountains, but the amounts in the valley probably will not be heavy.

Skiers couldn’t be happier. The Schweitzer ski area near Sandpoint is reporting more than 7 feet of snow pack.

No warm-up is in sight. Cold air is forecast to continue seeping into the region from the north. There is some good news. A severe arctic outbreak of below-zero temperatures is no longer in the forecast for the Inland Northwest for now.

A low-pressure area in the northern Gulf of Alaska is expected to draw stormy weather into the region at least until Monday.

This year already is going down in the record books as one of the wettest on record. More than 23 inches of rain and melted snow have been recorded at the airport this year, making 1996 the sixth-wettest since record keeping started in 1871.

The record for annual precipitation was 26.07 inches in 1948.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 photos (1 color)

The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Mike Prager Staff writer Staff writers Alison Boggs and Jeanette White contributed to this report.