The NW summer weather ahead: Today So Far

• El Niño has officially arrived and forecasters have an idea about what weather will like over the coming summer and winter.
• Amazon is heading into prime court time after running afoul of federal regulators.
• OceanGate confirms that debris from the Titan have been found at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and that all five passengers are dead.

This post originally appeared in KUOW's Today So Far newsletter for June 22, 2023.

We are officially in summer, and despite the recent cool weather and rain drops, the Northwest is heading into a few months of warmer, drier weather.

Washington State Climatologist Nick Bond told KUOW that July will be hot and dry, though nothing extreme. Looking further down the road, warmer and drier than normal weather is expected through about October, according to forecasts from the National Weather Service. But there are also indications that our region could get a lot of rain, too, as winter sets in. Bond notes that El Niño has officially arrived and is expected to be a strong one. In the past, strong El Niños have meant warmer winters, less snowpack, and a whole lot of rain. Flooding could be a factor in some areas.

Of course, whenever weather forecasts are being made, especially when they are so far out, there is a degree of uncertainty. Conditions could change, but as of now, this is the summer and winter weather we are expecting in the Northwest. Also, this forecast is being looked at as we head into wildfire season. Read the full story here.

Amazon is heading into prime court time after running afoul of federal regulators.

As KUOW's Monica Nickelsburg reports, the FTC is accusing Amazon of signing up customers for its Prime membership in a somewhat covert way. Customers may not have realized that they were being signed up while checking out for an order. On top of that, it is alleged that Amazon made it more difficult to cancel a Prime membership than it was to delete your MySpace account back in the day — my words, not the FTC's. The way one FTC chair put it, Amazon was using “manipulative tactics.” And the allegation is part of its "dark patterns" of operation.

At the same time of this allegation, Sen. Bernie Sanders has popped up again to look into injury rates at Amazon's warehouses. Sanders recently sent a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

“The company’s quest for profits at all costs has led to unsafe physical environments, intense pressure to work at unsustainable rates, and inadequate medical attention for tens of thousands of Amazon workers every year,” Sanders wrote. Check out the full story here.

As information comes forth about the Titan that has gone missing in the Atlantic, more and more local connections have become apparent.

The Titan is a submersible watercraft used by Everett-based OceanGate. The company gives tours to the sunken Titanic. It's CEO, Stockton Rush, is a Seattle resident. The University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory had previously helped the company design another submersible called CYCLOPS. That watercraft was used to travel the depths of Puget Sound, and took UW researchers along for the ride.

"If you had asked me, at the end, how long I've been down, I would have said 10 minutes. It was three and a half hours," said Adam Summers, a professor at UW's School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, noting the thrill of his Puget Sound trip.

UW helped out with the CYCLOPS from 2013 through 2020, but it didn't have any involvement with the Titan, which is now missing. KUOW's Isolde Raftery and Kate Walters have more insights here.

On Thursday, after this newsletter was sent Thursday morning, OceanGate confirmed that debris from the Titan was discovered not far from the sunken Titanic and all five passengers were dead. Read more here.

AS SEEN ON KUOW

Sonia Dillane holds her 21-month-old daughter at Webster Park on Tuesday, May 23, 2023, in Seattle. Dillane left her job to spend the first 18 months with her daughter, but when it came time to consider child care, Dillane just couldn’t do it — even though she loved her job at Amazon. Working women stand to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of their careers compared to their male counterparts. The median salary gap between men and women is particularly dramatic in Washington state. There are several complex factors driving this wedge between earning potential. The biggest one: motherhood. (Megan Farmer / KUOW)

DID YOU KNOW?

After writing about Tom Hanks' typewriter that showed up at Bremerton Office Machine Company, a reader wrote in to note that the repair shop had been around for decades, under the ownership of Bob Montgomery.

Montgomery was an interesting character. Years ago, I profiled him, at the age of 93, still working away in that shop. He had a lot of stories from over the years, but one that has stuck with me was his experience during WWII. Montgomery grew up working in his father's stationary shop, learning to repair typewriters. It was a skill that came in handy after he was drafted into the Army. Wherever he was transferred, a similar story played out. He trained in the mud and with rifles, but once officers found out he could repair typewriters, they would take away his rifle and put him in a military repair shop. Typewriters were important during the war. They were a primary source of communication, and the military needed a lot of them, and it needed them working. If Montgomery was transferred to a new post, the same story happened all over and he would be shoved into another typewriter repair shop. This happened at U.S. bases, in London, then France (he repaired typewriters in a horse stable at Versailles), on to Frankfurt, and so forth, typing away the whole time.

The funny thing was that Montgomery didn't initially want to go into the typewriter repair business. He grew up with it and wanted to do something new. But after coming home from the war, he decided not to fight it and opened his shop in Bremerton, where he worked until retiring at the age of 94. Montgomery passed away in 2018 at the age of 96.

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