Let’s remember when Seattle was covered in 5 feet of snow, on this day in 1880 (January 10)
It was called “Storm King” and it hit Seattle on January 9, 1880. It has so far been the largest snow storm to hit the Pacific Northwest in history (and I doubt that could ever be topped). Five feet of snow was dropped in Seattle.
As KOMO’s Scott Sistek put it:
But what makes the Storm King unique was that it came on the heels of a major snow event in Washington in the days before. There was already at least two feet of snow around the Puget Sound area when the Storm King made landfall as an estimated 955 mb monster around Astoria (about on par with some of our greatest wind storms to have since hit the region). With the strongest winds out of the south on the southern side of the low, Oregon was blasted with what [Wolf] Read estimates are at least 60–75 mph gusts, with perhaps some even higher gusts based on the amount of trees that were felled in the storm.
The photo I used above was taken on January 10, 1880 and shows five feet of snow on Cherry Street. Accounts at the time note that there was already a preceding snow storm to hit the area a few days prior, so some areas had more than doubled the amount of snow they had overnight.
As Sistek notes, a similar snow and windstorm could be catastrophic if it were to hit today:
Of course, had a storm of that magnitude struck today, you can imagine the damage and chaos to the region. To try to think of an even worse case scenario, if we brought in another great warm, Pineapple Express storm on this kind of storm’s heels, that would be about the worst it could get around here, I’d wager with another widespread snow event changing to heavy rains on top of 4–6 feet of snow accumulations causing massive collapses of weak structures.
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