We got a little over two feet of snow, mostly Saturday. Lost power for around 18 hours, luckily we recently invested in a wood-stove fireplace insert, so we had one comfortable room and it wasn’t below 50 anywhere in the house. (It’s been in the teens at night for some time.) I settled south of the Mason-Dixon line specifically to get away from this kind of weather. Here are a few pics:
I remember a photo of my brother-in-law, from around 1970, shoveling their driveway in Maine with a pile of snow almost taller than him. I didn’t think this would ever happen to me, especially in Maryland, but it has.
I live in Alabama and the Southeast had a winter storm in 1993 that people still talk about. We had 16 inches of snow at my house and temperatures of around 0 degrees for a few days. (Typically, Because that amount of snow had been, uh, unprecedented, to say the least, the snow brought down an incredible number of very old and large trees, many of which came down on homes and on powerlines, the latter taking down the power grid for the entire area. In addition, as discussed previously, the Southern states have very little equipment to deal with snow. At my house we had my mother, my wife, my three young daughters, and myself, all living in one room because of the cold. We had no heat except a fireplace, which I fed for 3 days. I ran out of firewood about the time the roads cleared. But, we were without heat or power for 7 days. Heated canned food over the fireplace. (I’ve since purchased a gas range!)
One more thing: I live on a service/frontage/access road, so there are houses on only one side of the street. Of course, the plow almost always throws the snow toward the houses rather than toward the other side (in 10 years, I remember them plowing the other way once). But this time, the plow hugged the curb. On the opposite side of the street. So there’s at least 10 feet between where the road has been plowed and all the mailboxes. I have no idea when or how we’ll get mail. Nobody I’ve talked to has any plans to dig out another few hundred cubic feet of snow to make a pathway from the road to the mailbox.
The new ones usally have electric ignition, which means they still don’t work in a blackout. I spent the five day Montreal Ice storm in an older apartment with a pilot-lit gas stove and furnace, which was unaffected. I ended up with about 18 friends sleeping on the floor.
I remember that well! I was about 13 at the time. I actually got stranded at my grandmother’s house for a few days because my parents couldn’t get on the road to pick me up. People here freak out at the slightest possibility of snow, and I’ve had a couple of people older than me say a lot of it goes back to that storm.
btw Dale- my coworker just told me Alabama might get snow Thursday. I’m sure I’ll see the typical horde of folks stocking up on their bread, milk, and beer, the 3 storm necessities here.
Looks good! But Simon’s advice may be prudent, snow is heavy. Two foot on a green house may crash the glass and may break some light structures, three foot on a shallow or flat roof may break some rafters.
I agree whole heartily with hans advice. I have rarely seen snow rakes in the east but with the impending snow I would suspect they could be crucial. And it looks like a high potential for ice damming to boot.
Of course it’s prudent. I come from the land of the ice and snow. From the Midnight Sun where the Hot Springs Blow!
And I have shovelled my share of rooves*. Probably more than my share, cuz I’m not scared of heights, so I usually get those kind of jobs. Anyway, in your area there will be collapsed rooves, maybe even a fatality or two. You’re probably ok with that much snow, but if you get rain or freezing rain on top of that, watch out! A roof pitch that low, or lower, can be trouble. Ironically, the worse your insulation, the better off you are, because your snow will melt away a lot sooner.
A dormer like that, by the way, is perfect for ‘safety’ roof shovelling, which means leaning out the window and sweeping away anything you can reach without going out onto the roof. If you’re not used to being on the roof, a snowy day isn’t the time to learn how. Up here, roof shovelling is what roofers do in the winter. Well, probably not in Vancouver, but everywhere else in Canada, sure.
*Yes, I know the dictionary says “roofs”. The dictionary can bite me.
