Yesterday was the 86th anniversary of The Great Blowdown ^[1], the 1921 windstorm that knocked over a few billion board feet of timber, killed a whole herd of elk and one man, and destroyed at least 16 homes.

I imagine after the storm was over and all the newspaper folk were sitting around talking about it, one of them pushed back his hat and said, “Well, that was one great blowdown” and the storm was named. Easy as pie.

But nowadays the internet is involved with everything, and the Weather Service is still working through the list of names requested in their contest [mb ^[2]]. The name will be announced at the Pacific Northwest Weather Convention on March 2, and I know you’re all waiting with bated breath. Will it be named after the Seahawks, or perhaps Gone With the Wind, which premiered on December 15, 1939 [P-I ^[3]]?

More interesting is the question of whether or not it should be named at all. Since the storm was ultimately responsible for killing 14 people, would naming it after our football team be disrespectful to the dead? The meteorologists say no, that naming it will help cement the storm in local memory and perhaps help people be better prepared next time. (In which case, perhaps the name should have something to do with carbon monoxide poisoning. The Please Don’t Use Your Charcoal Grill Inside Storm of 2007 might help avert that level of tragedy next time.)