...and On and On It Goes

February 7-10, 2015 — The meteorologists were calling it a "long duration" storm. I must have heard that phrase a few hundred times before, during and after the storm. Snow began falling in the early hours of Saturday morning and continued into the early morning hours of Tuesday. Most of the snow was of the light variety, but because of the "long duration" it accumulated to some very impressive depths, almost a foot on top of the nearly three feet from the two previous storms.

Temperature stayed in the single numbers and teens for most of the duration, so the snow was light and fluffy. The hardest part was shoveling through the dense bank, filled with icy chunks, thrown up by the plows in their frequent passes along my street. I had to shovel through that two or three times a day during the storm. The rest of the snow, in my driveway, walk and covering my car, was light and easy to move, but with my driveway surrounded by piles of snow nearing six feet in hieght, where to put it was becoming a problem. I'd pick up a shovel-full of snow, then walk around looking for a place to put it down.

Records have been broken south of here, in Boston and Worcester and their surrounding communities. After a series of disruptive breakdowns of MBTA cars in Boston, the city shut down the entire network Tuesday to try to recover, this at the same time they were urging people not to drive, creating a commuting nightmare.

As I look out over the enormous snow piles surrounding houses on my street, I think this is close to the highest snow depths I've seen in the forty-four years I've lived here. I don't think it quite reaches the totals of the Presidents' Day storm of 2003, but it's close.