Meteorologists say Interior Alaska is on track to step out of a historic cold snap this weekend.
That'll be good news to many Interior Alaskans, who have been dealing with dead car batteries, uncollected trash and other cold weather problems during the month-long freeze.
Confronted with one of those problems Tuesday, Fairbanks area resident Ben Schauble sat in his truck at the back of a long line of vehicles. It wrapped around the lot of the Sourdough Fuel Bulk Plant and spilled into a side street.
“This is 50 times more cars than I’ve ever seen here,” he told KUAC.
Schauble was there to fill up a tank with heating fuel before heading into work. It’s his typical way of getting fuel, he said, and despite the atypical wait time, he wasn’t concerned.
“It’s Fairbanks. You just live with it, and you deal with it, and move on,” Schauble said.
Fairbanks logged the coldest December since 1980 last month, with an average low of about 23 degrees below zero, according to the National Weather Service.
Persistent northerly winds due to a stubborn high-pressure system in the Bering Sea helped cause the intense cold, which continued into the New Year. The Fairbanks International Airport recorded 50 degrees below zero on Sunday, the lowest temperature it’s recorded this winter.
Fairbanks got a bit of a break from the deep cold already this week with the arrival of some cloud cover. That’s according to Evan Kutta, the science and operations officer at the National Weather Service office in Fairbanks.
“Anytime there aren’t clouds, we lose heat to space freely, so we’re able to get really cold, and Fairbanks is situated in a valley location, so the cold, dense air sinks down to the bottom of the valley,” he said.
Temperatures approaching 40 degrees below zero are predicted to return Thursday, but Kutta said a low pressure system moving through the Bering Sea will show the extreme temperatures the door heading into the weekend.
“That’s resulting in more southerly winds aloft, and more moisture and cloud cover streaming north from the Gulf of Alaska, so it’s going to be a more persistently warm pattern, with more frequent snow chances,” he said.
Still, “warm” is relative. The weather service forecasts a high of 10 degrees below zero on Saturday.
But that’ll be a relief of sorts for to a lot of folks in the Interior. The extreme weather has affected life in a number of ways beyond long wait times for heating feal – from delayed garbage pickup to the postponement of a popular New Year’s Eve fireworks show at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Cars have had their share of problems, too.
“It’s been really busy,” Jason Roberts, the operations manager of Metropolitan Garage, said in an interview Tuesday.
He said they’re seeing plenty of dead car batteries at the shop. Roberts also said they’re seeing hybrid vehicles with sensors that only read to 40 degrees below zero, and that when one of those cars does a systems check and gets no reading back, it won’t even try to start.
Roberts said that means the shop’s lot is packed with vehicles that can’t power themselves and that it’s been a “long, cold slog” to fix them up or thaw them out.
“It really affects the space we have, and everything’s dead,” he said. “So, we have to tow it in. It usually takes three technicians. We have an ATV, we have a Bobcat that we use. They’re just basically a ton brick that we’re towing into the shop.”
Kutta, with the weather service, said, for now, there doesn’t appear to be another cold snap on the horizon.
“We don’t see any sustained cold after we finally break out of this this weekend,” he said.
But it is Interior Alaska, and Kutta said while there’s not currently a sign of prolonged bitter cold returning, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
Editor's note: Metropolitan Garage is a current financial supporter of KUAC.