Oregon Public Broadcasting

It’s no secret that when winter weather arrives in Portland, “the city that works” doesn't.  Schools get closed, workers call in sick, and drivers chain up -- even when the pavement is bare and temperatures are above freezing. 

As Pete Springer reports, this kind of response baffles Portlanders who grew up in cities that get a lot more snow than the City of Roses.

Cort Medeiros grew up in upstate New York before moving to Boston for a job. 

While in Boston, she missed one day of work in six years due to weather – and that was only after a storm dumped six feet of snow.

She says it’s silly how people react to a mere forecast calling for snow in Portland.

Cort Medeiros: “People still get so freaked out about it and, are, you know, paralyzed by it and the whole city is shutdown and, that’s just kind of weird to me.”

Medeiros says constant television news coverage of winter weather in Portland helps fuel this paralysis.

Cort Medeiros: “I was like ‘Arctic Freeze’?  It’s 37 degrees outside and you know, maybe it will snow tonight, maybe it will snow tomorrow, but there’s definitely this kind of scare tactic of showing long lines of people at Wal*Mart buying water and batteries.”

Medeiros says if  weather shut down northeast cities like Boston the way it shuts down Portland, no one would ever go to school or work during the wintertime.

Portland area school officials say they have closed certain schools this week based on weather forecasts predicting snow and freezing temperatures.

Even though many of those forecasts have been wrong, school officials say considerations about the safe transport of students to and from school makes them err on the side of caution.

But Amy Taylor doesn’t buy this.  Taylor has lived in Portland for the last six years after growing up in Boulder, Colorado.

Amy Taylor “I mean I have to give it to Portland, you do have an ice problem around here that we didn’t necessarily have in Boulder, Colorado.  But I think there tends to be a little bit of an overreaction to weather like this.  People aren’t really familiar with it, but, um, it’s really not that bad out there.”

Taylor says when she was growing up in Boulder, her school superintendent was from Alaska so it pretty much took a blizzard to cancel school.

Amy Taylor “So not only did we live in Colorado where they rarely called a snow day, but our Alaskan superintendent really wasn’t going to call a snow day, so more often or not, we would be bundled up in our coats and ready to get to school.”

Even so, Taylor and other transplants to Portland get a kick over how so many places in the city shut down when a few snowflakes fall.

Amy Taylor “It’s sort of adorable how everybody thinks that the snow is a little bit of a catastrophe when they see it coming down from the sky.  Get out there and play.  Just have fun.”

That's exactly what many school kids have been doing this week.

But come June, they may regret all the  snow days.  That’s because Oregon schools require a certain amount of educational hours per year, and some of those snow days may have to be made up in June.