Tomorrow will mark a 20-year milestone for me: My first Weather Eye column appeared in this newspaper on Dec. 3, 1990. Boy, there has certainly been a lot of weather to talk about and a deluge of water in the rain gauge, over 1,000 inches, to be exact, at least at my weather station.
Being a freelance writer, I was asked by then-Features Editor Dave Kern if I would be interested in writing a weather column for The Columbian. In those days and even now, a dedicated column on weather is not all that common in newspapers. For long-time readers of this paper you may remember Columbo the weather dog, the Columbian’s weather mascot, who introduced my column.
Clark County during this time frame has seen the entry and departure of several El Niño and La Niña episodes, windstorms, floods and temperature swings of over 100 degrees from a high of 108 degrees to frigid lows in the single digits in the outlying areas. Not to mention a very white Christmas in 2008.
OK, so what was the headline on that very first column on Dec. 3, 1990? “State hit by erratic weather in November.” Goodness, I could use that one again for this November! I wrote back then that floodwaters were rampaging over the Thanksgiving holiday in Western Washington while dust storms driven by high winds thwarted travelers east of the Cascades. During this weird weather regime, Olympia received 5.50 inches of rain in just a 24-hour period, while for the entire month of November 1990, I measured only 4.70 inches. Clark County escaped much of the heavy rain and flooding that year.
