Portland: Broken beacon beckons again

Published 1:48 pm Monday, November 18, 2024

Workers lost little time in repairing and lifting Downtown Portland’s iconic but little understood weather beacon.

The odd little landmark was once again vertical and glowing as of early afternoon, Monday, Nov. 18.

The beacon has stood atop Standard Plaza, 1100 S.W. Sixth Ave., since 1963 and uses solid or flashing colors to indicate incoming weather. For many longtime Portlanders, it’s a beloved sight. For others, it’s rarely seen and poorly understood.

“The weather beacon is out of service for days,” Bob Speltz, senior director of community and public relations for The Standard, an insurance company, told the Tribune on Sunday, Nov. 17. “The recent wind storms broke some of the pulleys and rope on the beacon. Engineers had to bring down the beacon for repairs and will continue to work on this Monday. There were already some of the holiday lights up, too, so they’ll be working on getting these back in place after the repairs have been completed.”

But a mere one day later, and the beacon was back.

The four-foot-tall beacon, atop a long flag pole, serves all year long to forecast the weather. But from the night before Thanksgiving until the end of the year, the beacon and its pole also are lit up as a Christmas tree.

Many native Portlanders and longtime residents know the code from their childhoods: The beacon uses colored LED lights to provide the following weather forecasts:

• Red: A five-degree temperature increase is expected in the next 24 hours.
• Green: The temperature is not expected to change.
• White: The temperature will decrease by five degrees.
• Flashing: Precipitation is expected.

The forecast is updated twice per day using data from the National Weather Service.

Once an iconic part of downtown, today the beacon is often difficult to see due to the many tall buildings in the area.

Ken Boddie, then an anchor for KOIN 6 News, wrote about the beacon in 2019. “Portland is one of the few places in the United States where the public can still get their basic forecast from a weather beacon,” he wrote. “Dozens of weather beacons were once scattered across the United States.”

KOIN 6 is a news partner of the Tribune.

Boddie interviewed Speltz in 2019. “We started to see the advent of these weather beacons in the 1950s and 1960s, and there were dozens of them at one time scattered around cities in the United States,” Speltz said.

The Standard’s weather beacon was built in 1950 on top of another Standard property as a public service. It moved to its current location in 1963.

“Standard Plaza was one of the largest buildings in downtown, so this beacon could be seen from miles and miles away,” Speltz said.

As of 2019, only a few other cities still had weather beacons, including Toronto, Boston and San Francisco.