Postal officials shut down regular mail delivery Thursday, Feb. 23, following a snowstorm that blanketed Portland with record one-day snowfall on Wednesday, leading to hours-long traffic jams and other complications.
The New Era was among local mail not delivered in Sweet Home for the first time in memory after local carriers were told not to come in to work Thursday morning due to transport aircraft being grounded and delivery trucks being unable to transport mail from Portland.
David Rupert, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service, blamed the situation on “weather and transportation issues” which, he said, prohibited inbound mail from arriving in certain post offices.
Other delivery companies – UPS and FedEx – also shut down some operations.
Sweet Home and Brownsville did not deliver regular mail, according to staffers who kept the front counters operating in those locations.
“When the main transportation hubs are closed or hampered, the downstream impacts are real,” Rupert said. “Every organization that depends on transportation has weather impacts. For example, I was one of the Southwest airlines impacts at Christmas. It wasn’t snowing in Nashville, but my flight was cancelled.”
He cited TV reports that the vast majority of flights scheduled to arrive or depart from Portland International Airport on Wednesday were either canceled or significantly delayed.
“We depend on inbound mail at the hub in order to sort to the spoke offices,” Rupert said. “No mail arrived, so there was no mail to sort.”
He said that Lebanon postal carriers were active in town, but did not deliver to some higher-elevation addresses and that at least two Brownsville routes were delivered.