Rico's rants: Worst winter ever?

22 February 2014

Worst winter ever?

Anthony R. Wood has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about this interminable winter:

The mountainous, blackening snow piles, record power outages, winter-strafed roadbeds, and legions of defeated trees. All argue for the singular ferocity of the winter of 2013-14.
Dr. Theodore A. Christopher has witnessed something else, and if the weather community isn't ready to rank this season on the severity scale, he is. "This is the worst," said Christopher, the director of emergency medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where he has worked for thirty years. "No question." Christopher ranks it ahead of even the winters of 2009-10 and 1995-96, which were snowier, and 1993-94, which was icier.
He has seen no end to emergency-room visits from automobile-accident victims, slip-and-fall episodes, people with broken bones. "There's been nonstop orthopedic injuries," he said. "It seems every three or four days there's a major snowstorm."
Well, not quite. But by any measure, if not Number One, this season qualifies as one of the most disruptive winters in the 130-year period of record in Philadelphia. The 58.4 inches of snow, a total that would reach to Napoleon's lips or eyebrows, depending on the historical account one accepts, officially ranks at Number Three. (The winter of 1898-99, Number Four, probably deserves consideration, and if you have personal memories, please contact us immediately.) That total doesn't include the mammoth ice-lacquering of 5 February that constituted the most devastating event of the season.
And this one isn't over: Temperatures in the fifties should gently erode more of the snowpack remnants, but more Arctic air is due to pour in this week, with snow possible Tuesday and/or Wednesday. At least that will put off any threat of flooding from rapid melting. In short, those darkening mounds and graying meringues of snow might be here until St. Patrick's Day, if not the equinox.
One upside: the uglier it gets, the better it melts, points out Colorado climatologist Nolan Doesken, an expert in snowmelt. Darker surfaces draw heat better than lighter ones.
"I use the term relentless," said Eugene Blaum, the veteran Pennsylvania Department of Transportation spokesman. He isn't the only one.
This all started with a foreboding suddenness when a surprise, nationally-televised whiteout snowfall blitzed South Philadelphia, where the Eagles were hosting the Detroit Lions, and the rest of the region. By 7 pm on 8 December 2013, almost two weeks before the official start of winter, more snow had fallen in eight hours than in all of last season, and twice as much as the season before. That was the first of four snowfalls of eight inches or more; never had Philadelphia recorded more than three storms of six inches or better in a single season, according to National Weather Service records.
The snow has kept coming, focusing its intensity along either side of the Delaware River corridor, as snow bands have wrung out staggeringly rapid accumulations over the city and adjacent South Jersey, where towns have been running out of salt.
Strangely, while snowfall has been above normal throughout the East, it has been over the top in the Philadelphia and New York City areas, well over three hundred percent of normal in Philadelphia.
Around here, when in doubt, it has snowed, almost as though the atmosphere were primed.
"It can't help itself," said Gary Szatkowski, meteorologist in charge of the weather service office in Mount Holly, New Jersey.
What's more, the snow totals usually have ended up in the higher range of the forecasts, if not higher, noted Nick Martino, PennDot maintenance director for the Philadelphia region, with one notable exception.
The forecast for 5 February 2014 called for one to three inches of snow, followed by freezing rain. The snow never showed. The rain did, and conspiring with the hefty remnants of the heavy snows of 3 February 2014, resulted in a disaster, especially for residents of the Pennsylvania counties outside Philadelphia. In all, 715,000 would lose power. Entire towns, including Malvern in Chester County, lost power for three days.
Peco Energy has set a record for winter outages this season, with 822,048, according to spokesman Ben Armstrong, passing the 1993-94 total of 640,424.
PennDot set a new standard for salt, with 157,815 tons usedin the Philadelphia region, well surpassing the 142,738 of 2009-10 and the 101,185 of 1995-96. Salt supplies have reached crisis levels throughout the region. "We're a storm away from having nothing," said Joe Dee, spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Transportation, which has spread 442,000 tons this season, compared with 258,000 last winter. More salt is on the way, and so is more winter.
"It seems like we're out there every other day," said PennDot's Martino, adding: "It's not like we're taking care of nuisance storms."
The timing of the havoc has been uncannily bad, bedeviling workdays, wrecking rush hours. The 8 December 2013 storm came on a Sunday, but it shut down untreated roads on what should have been a bustling Christmas-shopping day.
For numbers of days on which an inch or more of snow has fallen, this season is tied for third place with eleven, said Tony Gigi, meteorologist at the National Weather Service Office in Mount Holly, New Jersey, and it might take over second place this week. For severity, Gigi still favors 1993-94, which featured a perhaps unprecedented sequence of ice storms and one of the coldest outbreaks in the period of record. However, he notes, this one actually is running colder, and snow totals are more than double that winter's.
Dr. Michael Goodyear, Christopher's counterpart at Riddle Memorial Hospital in Media, Pennsylvania, said that, along with post-snow back injuries and chest-pain complaints, his emergency department has treated "several" patients for frostbite, something he can't recall happening. "It's been crazy," said Christopher, adding that he had one regret: "I should have bought a snowblower."