A June for the record books
Coldest start to month in history raises electric bills, stalls farm crops
By MIKE BARBER
P-I REPORTER
With snowplows in the mountain passes and the Seattle area's coldest June start in recorded history, the Northwest's freakishly chilly June gloom is a sunny contrast to climatic drama playing out in the rest of the nation.
We aren't experiencing the flash floods, evacuations and costly storms of the Midwest, nor the humid, near-100-degree sweltering heat of New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and New York, where cooling centers have been set up. The storms and heat combined claimed at least 17 lives as of Tuesday.
But with summer only 10 days away, Seattle residents are shivering at the prospect of higher heating bills, traction tires in the mountain passes and a shortened growing season for local farmers.
"The plants are just sulking because of the cold," said Amy Turner, who owns Blue Dog Farm in Carnation with her husband, Scott. Blueberry and strawberry harvests will be delayed.
The wetness, meanwhile, has made it difficult to get tractors into the fields, and farmers are working hard to protect what they have.
"On the vegetable end, the cold is pushing a lot of things back. We'd expect to be taking them to market by now, but they're not ready. It's one setback after another," Turner said.
The season delay could ripple into autumn, said August Gurtisen, manager of V2 Farm in Enumclaw, which grows corn, pumpkins, potatoes, lettuce, peas and broccoli.
"We'll have pumpkins this fall, in time for Halloween, but they won't be as big as they usually are," he said.
"Usually everything would be planted and growing by now, but we can't do it until the weather clears up. We'll plant whenever it gets dry, but whether that's tomorrow or two months from now, I don't know."
Bill Pace, manager of Bill Pace Fruit and Produce, a 20-acre blueberry farm owned by the city of Bellevue, said "produce is out there, but it's not readily available like in the past. The vegetables will be late, that's all they'll be. You can't grow them in this cool, wet weather."
Overall, daytime high temperatures in the region have averaged at least 10 degrees below normal -- while overnight lows have been only slightly chillier than normal -- translating int
"For the first six days of June, we've seen about 30 to 35 percent more natural gas usage compared to the average taken from the same six days in the prior three years," said Roger Thompson of Puget Sound Energy.
Thompson said the utility has seen an increase in customer demand for electricity because of the cooler spring.
The power comes from hydroelectric plants, and that's been a problem.
"The cooler weather delayed runoff from our watersheds, so water stayed as a snowpack instead of melting," he said. "We saw a 23 percent drop in the production capacity of our dams, so we ended up going to electricity markets to buy additional power because of the lower production and increased demand."
Energy assistance, meanwhile, continues to be available for low-income households, he said.
Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, calls 2008 "the worst year since 1917" in terms of days under 60 degrees.
Mass created his own "barbecue index," figuring 60 degrees as the baseline temperature at which folks generally will grill food outdoors. So far, there have been only 23 days above 60 degrees in 2008, second only to the 18 above-60-degree days recorded in 1917.
The National Weather Service said temperatures should climb to about 70 by the end of this week but are expected to drop back to around 60 by Sunday.
"During the period from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, you can make an argument that the Northwest was colder than it is now," said Jay Albrecht, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Seattle.
In some ways, Albrecht said, the current local weather pattern reminds him of 1993, which locally some people recall as the "year without a summer," the gray drizzle broken by only a few warm spells, while the Midwest saw big floods and severe weather.
Albrecht said the unusually persistent trough of cool upper level pressure systems rolling down from the Bering Sea and Alaska is the reason for the weather. Yet it is also contributing to woes in the Midwest, South and East as it dominoes east across the continent.
Across the nation Tuesday, drenching rains in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana have flooded cornfields and made it difficult for farmers to plant, causing corn prices to reach record highs in commodities exchanges this week. Military crews in several states joined desperate sandbagging operations to hold back surging streams and breached dams.
The East Coast, meanwhile, was gripped by a heat wave. Heat watches and advisories were in effect Tuesday from North Carolina to Massachusetts, where forecasters said the thermometer could top out near 100 degrees.
P-I reporter Claire Trageser contributed to this report, which also includes information from The Associated Press. P-I Reporter Mike Barber can be reached at 206-448-8018 or [email protected].
