The Pacific Northwest was pummeled by winter weather on Thursday, with snow and ice in Oregon shutting down schools and causing dozens of car crashes throughout the state.
A storm dumped snow on the Willamette Valley in northwest Oregon on Thursday, KPTV reports. A 20-car pileup closed part of Interstate 5 on Thursday morning, the Oregonian reports, while Oregon State University closed its main campus in Corvallis. The Oregon Department of Transportation told drivers, “Don’t be Atlanta” and to have a snow plan before the bad weather hits—a nod to the snowfall that virtually shut down parts of the Atlanta region and stranded people in their cars for more than a day last week.
The mayhem in Oregon was just the latest in what’s already been a tough 2014 for winter weather and the problems that come with it. In early January, much of the country saw some of the most frigid temperatures in decades. A few weeks later, Atlanta and other parts of the South were paralyzed by snow and ice. Thousands of people in the mid-Atlantic are still without power two days after an ice storm downed trees and power lines. More than 300,000 people were without power in Pennsylvania on Thursday, along with 50,000 in Maryland, the Associated Press reports.
Meteorologists in the Portland area are expecting ice on the roads to begin melting on Friday, but they’ve warned that a new round of snow could hit the area again heading into the weekend.