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Our First Snow!


MickinMD

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Yesterday it was 57°F at 9 pm and AccuWeather forecast something like, "Snow, Insignificant Total."

I woke up at 7 am and it was dark as night outside (artificially brightened picture taken at 7:15 am).

Now it's 32° (RealFeel 16°), about an inch of snow and 3" to 6" total by noon (the 6-10 in in the Accuweather snip below is wrong).

My guess is the ground is warm enough I won't have to shovel much snow, just push a little slush off the sidewalks and clean off the car.

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Now the TV weather is saying it's most intense south of the city and 29° and their saying snow until 3-4 pm instead of ending at noon.

I'm south of the city.

Now they're saying 2" to 4" in my area - the heavier snow range begins at Annapolis, about 20 miles south of me. Unfortunately, my sister's house is only several miles from Annapolis and she and her husband have his cancer radiation treatment today. She has a 4-wheel drive car and is used to driving in snow: as a nurse at Johns Hopkins, she always HAD to get to work and in deep snow, the National Guard would pick her up and take her to work.

The TV is showing disabled vehicles, etc. from the idiots who forget that bridges freeze before the rest of the road does, etc.  They're reminding people to "clear the snow off your entire car - not just the windshield."  That's a no-brainer but, unfortunately, a lot of people have less than no-brains.

My county stretches along the Chesapeake Bay and its warming effect often limits the snow and means our kids often have school when counties 5-10 miles inland do not.

But our schools are closed today.

It's not foggy - that's heavy falling snow in the picture and it's starting to cover the road.  It may still melt on the roads today, but I don't need to drive anywhere today.  This picture is 8 am, 45 min. after the first pic and you can see the grass is almost entirely buried now.

Yesterday's forecast that Thursday will have a high of 57° is now 39°.  Wednesday's 42° and cloudy looks like the best day to  walk Jake 2-3 miles this week

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17 minutes ago, Old No. 7 said:

We are getting the white stuff too. It’s sticking to the roads before 8 am. We’ve got an inch already and will probably hit the forecast four times six inches. The birds are loving our feeders this morning. 

Yeah, the sidewalks started accumulating about 30 mins ago.  We're easily over an inch on the deck, railings, and tree branches so far.

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Shoot!  It looks like a good snow-shoveling awaits this afternoon.  Depending on the source, we're forecast for 2-4", 4-8", or 6-10".  I'd heavily bet on 4-8", probably closer to 4".  Of course, the TV news is reporting "chaos on the roads" and basically predicting the end of the world.

Oh well, I need the exercise and I bought the elt, etc.

Here are the 7 am and 10 am pics out my front door and 10 am out my kitchen window:

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My sister Donna sent these pictures, from around 9 am, as her husband Brian drove them to his lung cancer radiation therapy at Johns Hopkins/Bayview.

The second picture is on the Key Bridge over the Patapsco River near its mouth at the Chesapeake Bay - a toll road, it's ALWAYS usually plowed. He has a Dodge pickup truck and I think it has 4-wheel drive.  She has a Honda CRV with 4-wheel drive does well in the snow: before retiring, she often HAD to show up at work as a Senior Clinical Nurse at Johns Hopkins - the National Guard picked her up if she couldn't drive.

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The Washington, D.C. TV stations are saying this is the deepest snow since 8.4" in January, 2019. Some areas may surpass that.

We've been blessed for several years: we have had winters with three 20+" snows and several 6-12" snows.

I hope this isn't an introduction to a snowy winter: I hate shoveling about 200 total feet of sidewalk.

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10 minutes ago, MickinMD said:

The Washington, D.C. TV stations are saying this is the deepest snow since 8.4" in January, 2019. Some areas may surpass that.

We've been blessed for several years: we have had winters with three 20+" snows and several 6-12" snows.

I hope this isn't an introduction to a snowy winter: I hate shoveling about 200 total feet of sidewalk.

Hire your nephew to shovel your sidewalk. 

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1 minute ago, ChrisL said:

My MIL is flying out Friday. Any chance for more snow & weather delays???

Another chance of snow Thursday, but the forecast is just a dusting and won’t affect MIL’s flight. Her flight has a higher chance of cancellation due to Covid. With your luck she will make her flight. Sorry Chris.

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Just now, Old No. 7 said:

Tree down! Not a big one but it’s in the road. So7 took the chainsaw out to clean it up. Disaster averted. 

 

We're gonna see a bit of that, I think.  My trees and bushes are pretty weighed down.  I kept dumping snow down my neck while walking the dog because the normally high branches were all lower and hitting my head.

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8 minutes ago, Razors Edge said:

We're gonna see a bit of that, I think.  My trees and bushes are pretty weighed down.  I kept dumping snow down my neck while walking the dog because the normally high branches were all lower and hitting my head.

Sucks to be tall doesn’t it?

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Since Maryland's snowfall amounts vary from more than Juneau, Alaska to, much more often, not much, the state and local governments don't maintain huge numbers of snow removal vehicles.

A little before 1 pm, my sister and BiL were trying to get home from radiation treatment.

The main road, Ritchie Hwy, was closed southbound.  There is a highly-use road, Benfield Blvd., running for several miles through a high-income area that meets the highway right across the road to her community. I suggested they try to access it from I-97 instead of saving 10 miles by using the local, twisting, hilly, one-lane-each-way Jumpers Hole Road or by another one lane road in a more-rural area.  I don't know how they went,  but they were able to get home.  They normally get home from therapy by 11:45 am.  Today it was just before 1 pm.

Pic 1: Ritchie Hwy: 3-lanes and the most heavily traveled road between Baltimore and Annapolis. Closed southbound at some point.

Pic 2: She said the ramps are awful with long lines of trucks trying to enter or exit expressways:

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The covered front porch filled up with about as much snow as the no-roof back porch.

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The snowplow will eventually clear the road, then some people will clean off their vehicles and throw the snow in the middle of the road!

Sometimes, they get the more-used road in front of the house but don't get the side road for a couple days.  I may have to shovel a 40 foot path for my blue car to get to the main road.

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Looks like we're done: about 5" of snow.

It's 34° with no wind so I'm now going to shovel the snow before it melts and forms a crust on top.

A problem with snow in Maryland is that the temperature is usually close to melting when the snow falls, so there can be a 1/2" thick layer of ice from the refrozen water under the snow making driving tricky.

A snowplow came through an hit both of my streets, though not very well.

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This is a great way to end a snowy day:  34°, almost no wind, and the snow stops soon enough to allow a couple hours of daylight for shoveling 200 feet of sidewalk and two porches and clearing off the car and its surroundings in case you need to drive in an emergency.

Then, as you're closing in on the end, the sun comes out!  I'm sore from 2 hours of shoveling, brushing, and scraping, but am pleased it's done and I don't have to think about doing it tomorrow!

The snow plow came through early enough so most of the snow on the street melted - though it will freeze overnight.

There will be highs of 37° and 44° the next two days so the little bits I missed are exposed enough to the air and sun to melt.

 

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The PVC pipe pointing down is the exhaust pipe for my 92% efficiency furnace.  A chimney can't be used because so little heat escapes in the exhaust that water formed from burning natural gas would condense in the chimney and run back down into the furnace.

Here, the 6" of snow underneath the pipe, with the exhaust directed right at it, has only been melted about 1 inch!

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Drivers Stuck for Hours After Snowstorm Creates ‘Horrendous' Conditions

...while living in D.C. for the first 18 years if my life, and during the four years I returned to attend U of MD, College Park, I was always fascinated by how quickly and thoroughly 6 inches of snow could paralyze the place.  It was especially interesting, once I had lived in places where it snowed a lot more regularly, like New London in CN, and the Twin Cities in MN.  Now, watching Tahoe buried in like 17 feet of snow that isn't going any place until Spring, it's even more intriguing to me. 

I guess the idea is that if you know something is going to happen on a regular basis, you spend money on the equipment and preparations.  And if it only happens sporadically, your preparations are sporadic as well.

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1 hour ago, Page Turner said:

I guess the idea is that if you know something is going to happen on a regular basis, you spend money on the equipment and preparations.  And if it only happens sporadically, your preparations are sporadic as well.

This is why Seattle is a party every time it snows.  Now that I live up further north, we have more plows and less city.

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27 minutes ago, Dottles said:

This is why Seattle is a party every time it snows.  Now that I live up further north, we have more plows and less city.

I was always amazed at the lack of preparation for snow on the west side of Oregon compared to the east side when we lived in Burns.

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It seems as if the world has turned upside down.  In the 5 plus years that I lived in Norfolk VA and Virginia Beach we almost never saw snow.  A couple of inches was a big deal and would all but shut down the state.  Now storms like this dump as much as a foot while in CT I'm getting no snow at all, just cold and grey.  I've probably cursed myself for writing this as now we are scheduled for snow on Friday.

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Quote

 

On social media, drivers reported being stranded for 12 hours or more. The ordeal began at about 1 p.m. for Tim Kaine, Virginia’s junior U.S. senator and a former Democratic nominee for vice president. A spokeswoman for Mr. Kaine, Ilse Zuniga, said he was heading for the Capitol when the ice and accidents disrupted his normal two-hour commute.

On Twitter on Tuesday morning, Mr. Kaine said he was still on the interstate, 19 hours after he had set out for Washington.

By about 1 p.m., his spokeswoman said, Mr. Kaine had been freed from the standstill and was again on his way, after a pit stop to fill up on gas and buy food.

 

“This has been a miserable experience,” Mr. Kaine told WTOP, a Washington-area radio station. “But at some point, I kind of made the switch from a miserable travel experience into kind of a survival project.”

 

Drivers Stranded Overnight as Snowstorm Shuts Part of I-95 in Virginia

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9 minutes ago, Page Turner said:

It's why, when the snow starts, I stay off the roads whenever possible.  I don't think I heard the plows much yesterday except the local private company that does my neighborhood roads.  Seemed they did some treating with chemicals, but didn't fully prepare for plowing? Or maybe their crews are short due to omicron, too?

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