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Louise
, June 26, 2006
Oregonians, especially Portlanders, LOVE to talk about the weather, even though the Pacific Northwest is known for its mild weather. None of those tornadoes, hurricanes, or winter-long boughts of snow for us. We do get extreme weather here, though, and this book highlights notable occurances of extreme Portland weather starting with 1852. It is full of all the details and anecdotes that weather-buffs love to read about, supported mostly by historic climate data and articles from The Oregonian newspaper.
This book is not without its flaws, however. For one thing, Hatton chose a month-grouping method for telling his weather stories. For example, he starts with the month of January, listing all the years when extreme weather happened in January. The he moves onto February, and so on. I think it would have been far more useful to take a chronological approach, narrating all the weather events for one year, then the next, and so on.
Perhaps an index would be too difficult to compile for a book like this, but some kind of category list would have been helpful. Something to scan to get a quick picture of weather events. For example, I would have liked a list of floods discussed throughout the book, or a list of the big snowstorms discussed. It would also make it easier to locate such notorious events as the Vanport Flood and the Columbus Day Storm. A timeline would have been really helpful too, considering that the book is not in chronological order. A way to see quickly what the weather was like throughout one year, and from one year to the next.
The organization is inconsistent. July and August are grouped together, but that is easy to miss if you're just paging through, since August ends up with it's own heading, while July is back under the July-August heading, which is also where the August summary is, not over under the August heading. Also, December 1861 gets a subheading of "The Great Flood of 1861," but May 1894 does not receive a similar heading, despite being a major flood.
The most glaring problem with this book, however, is that it does not cover the flood of February 1996. It is alluded to several times, including January 1996, where it refers to the flood that would happen next month and says "See February 1996 for details." But the February section ends with 1995. Considering what a big deal that flood was, that it was one of the biggest weather events in recent memory, it seems rather inexecusable to have forgotten to include it, even though the author clearly meant to.
This is a good reference book for weather events, and would be handy for school reports and the like. Though it's bulk is Oregonian articles and weather data, and it has the problems I've mentioned above, it should still make a handy reference for people who want to learn about significant Portland weather events quickly.
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