Warm weather causes 40' wall of snow isolates town

Luddly Neddite

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'Biggest Avalanche Ever Seen' Blocks Only Road To Valdez, Flood Watch Renewed » The Free Patriot

The only road leading into Valdez, Alaska, has been blocked by avalanches and the resultant flooding.

The Richardson Highway, the only road into Valdez, Alaska, continues to be isolated by what the Alaska Department of Transportation Officials believe to be the largest avalanche to ever hit the Thompson Pass/Keystone Canyon region.

Last Friday, a massive avalanche closed off the pass and dammed the Lowe River and created flash flooding concerns for the residents of Valdez. Water from the Lowe River reached to what appeared to be 30 feet deep based on geographical markings. The avalanche placed a 40 foot high wall of snow that extends through a large segment of the Canyon. The combined flood and avalanche has kept Alaska Department of Transportation workers from accessing the area to reopen the road.

WATCH: Avalanche-Dammed River Cuts Off Road to Valdez, Alaska

Check out the video -

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The only road leading into Valdez, Alaska, has been blocked by avalanches and the resultant flooding.
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Gee, an avalanche in Alaska? This is totally unexpected and out of the ordinary.
 
I couldn't get the second link to show a video, it must be awesome to see
 
Here's an update. We're seeing more and more unexpected weather like this and will surely see more as climate change progresses.

Only road into Alaskan town could be cut off for FOUR more days | Mail Online

Supplies are airlifted into Valdez for town's 4,000 residents who have been trapped since Friday
Heavy rain triggered two avalanches that dumped up to 100ft of snow on the highway
Homes near a 500 million gallon lake created by the ice dam are evacuated

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More photos and info at link.


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You almost gotta laugh. Half a dozen people have been killed by snowfall as far south as New Orleans and the radical left thinks it's summer in Alaska.
 
Guess we'll have to wait for NCDC's monthly report in a couple weeks so we can interrupt this lovely anecdotal banter with some facts. Sounds like several local records have been broken, not sure about the average temps across the whole state for the month.
 
Sounds like several local records have been broken

Yes. It's called rain. This avalanche had nothing to do with global warming. It was caused by a 3 inch rainfall. A record for this particular day of January.
 
Well the numbers are in... NCDC says Alaska had the third-warmest January ever... looks like the 4 of the top 5 years were before 1986... Runaway warming, indeed.

 
Sounds like several local records have been broken

Yes. It's called rain. This avalanche had nothing to do with global warming. It was caused by a 3 inch rainfall. A record for this particular day of January.


Do you wonder why it's raining not snowing in-----in Valdez, Ak? Katayusha - right over your head - huh?

On January 30, (Record warmth, huge avalanches isolate Valdez, Alaska - US Message Board - Political Discussion Forum) I posted the excerpt below. Check it out, AK's Dept.of Transportation engineer calls this event "extroidinary". Rightwingers may want to look up the word extroidinary because they're... well, you know -- challenged.



Contained in the OP article: 'Extraordinary' event
Mike Coffey, Alaska Department of Transportation's statewide maintenance engineer, told the Alaska Dispatch the event was "extraordinary."

But so, too, were the conditions triggering the event.
The shifting polar vortex that is sending the eastern half of the Lower 48 into the deep freeze has pulled warm, moist air from the Pacific into Alaska.

More than three inches of rain fell in 24 hours in the mountains above Valdez, according to the Valdez Avalanche Center, destabilizing the snowpack.

Record warmth

Unheard-of temperatures in the 40s and even 50s added further stress. Records have dropped across Alaska this week: Nine were set on Monday alone.



To give people an idea how freaky an event this was for the 49th State, NASA has put together a visualization of phenomenal temperatures from January 23 to the 30th. Based on satellite readings, the map shows warm-weather abnormalities spreading in red all across the region. Areas of white were about average, meanwhile, and blue spots show cooler-than-normal temps:
 
Do you wonder why it's raining not snowing in-----in Valdez, Ak? Katayusha - right over your head - huh?

:eusa_eh:

No, I wasn't wondering that at all. Because unlike you, I'm not an idiot. Just because it's Alaska doesn't mean that it always snows and never rains.

And please tell me you're not even more of an idiot than I initially thought, by trying to claim that global warming has made the difference between it raining that day instead of snowing.
 
Do you wonder why it's raining not snowing in-----in Valdez, Ak? Katayusha - right over your head - huh?

:eusa_eh:

No, I wasn't wondering that at all. Because unlike you, I'm not an idiot. Just because it's Alaska doesn't mean that it always snows and never rains.

And please tell me you're not even more of an idiot than I initially thought, by trying to claim that global warming has made the difference between it raining that day instead of snowing.


"It wasn’t just Alaska. Greenland has been about
5°C warmer than normal in January."


I pity people whose intellect is so shallow that they have no choice but to resort to ad hominem attacks because the point their ideology forces them to make is so lame it won't stand up on it's own.

Alaska Avalanche Information Center in Valdez, forecaster Sarah Carter said “This was an abnormal event,” and Carter said “If we do have weather patterns that produce storms with warmer temperatures, we could indeed see avalanches of this caliber more frequently.”



Hot Alaska, Cold Georgia: How The Shifted Polar Vortex Turned Winter Upside-Down
Why the displaced cold? The polar vortex has been pulled south by an unusually extreme jet stream, which some scientists have suggested will happen more frequently in a warming world. This leaves the far north much warmer than normal. Consider Alaska.

Richardson Highway, the only road that connects the Alaskan port town of Valdez with the rest of civilization, suffered a series of a dozen avalanches that buried the road 40 feet deep and hundreds of feet long last month (video here). Valdez City Manager John Hozey told NPR “there are slides there every year but not like this”:
What happened was we had really unusual weather. When it got really cold down there in the Lower 48, it got really warm up here and it actually started to rain. Temperatures at the tops of the mountains were approaching high 40s, even 50 degrees, and rain. That just destabilized the snowpack that’s there every year. And people who’ve lived here for 30, 40 years say they’ve never seen a slide like that.


Valdez City Manager John Hozey: "it actually started to rain."
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Star, did you even see my chart a few posts back? If this warm Alaska January is global warming's fault why are the top 2 January's and 4 of the top 5 from before 1986?
 

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