SLUSH HOUR TRAFFIC
Rain, then heavy snow, leaves Valley a mess again
Quick, somebody put in a call to Mother Nature and remind her, spring gets here in 11 days.
You’d think she forgot, judging from the back-to-back Nor’easters that have pummeled the region in less than a week, leaving northern Rhode Islanders weary from shoveling, cranking up generators and cooking on gas grills because they don’t have electricity.
The latest blast of wild weather arrived late Wednesday afternoon as rain before changing overnight to leaden, wind-driven snow that took down limbs and utility lines, knocking out power – again – to thousands.
Compared to last Friday’s event – mostly rain, albeit pushed by hurricane-force winds – the storm dubbed Quinn wasn’t nearly as damaging, though the Blackstone Valley took the worst of it. Providence County, especially north and west of I-95, chalked
up the highest snow totals and the most power outages.
Statewide, there were about 17,000 customers without power at the height of the storm, the overwhelming majority in Providence County.
During the earlier storm, about 150,000 of National Grid’s roughly 490,000 customers lost power – some for days. For many of those who lost power overnight Wednesday into Thursday, it was the second time the lights went out in five days.
National Grid had brought in hundreds of out-of-state line and road crews to augment its repair capacity in anticipation of last week’s storm. The utility company held many of them back to attack the next round of damage and they appeared to be making steady progress throughout the day yesterday.
“We realize dealing with the aftermath of two storms so close together is frustrating,” National Grid said in a statement posted to its web site late Thursday morning, imploring its customers for patience.
As of press time, however, the number of customers still without power had dipped to just a few thousand, and National Grid said it expected that most everyone would have power again by this morning.
With temperatures hovering around the freezing point, the state was straddling a rain-snow line during much of the storm, leading to widely variable snow totals within some surprisingly short distances, even in the relatively compact geography of the Blackstone Valley. According to the National Weather Service, Burrillville was the jackpot zone, with 13 inches, the state’s highest. East Providence got just an inch of snow; West Warwick had five; Coventry three; Pawtucket six; and Woonsocket, seven.
But Woonsocket Public Works Director Steve D’Agostino said the seemingly modest snow-depths in the city belied the power of the storm. The snow was so heavy it damaged plows and brought down limbs that interfered with road-clearing operations.
“We were cutting down trees at night as we were plowing,” said D’Agostino. “The guys had chain saws with them in the truck. That’s the kind of storm it was. Heavy snow. Wet. Really nasty stuff.”
With its wobbly, rain-snow line slicing a fuzzy diagonal across the state, the storm was a tough one for forecasters to call. The changeover from rain to snow came later than many had predicted – so late that some armchair forecasters were wondering if the professionals called it wrong.
It was raining so hard across much of the region as night fell that it hardly seemed possible for the precipitation to transition to snow. But around 8 p.m., it did, and the shift was dramatic. Suddenly, the rain was replaced by extra-large, water-laden snowflakes that piled up fast and stuck to everything like glue.
“It came down very fast,” said Pawtucket’s Assistant Public Works and Operations Director William D. Vieira Sr. “We had people out pre-treating the roads at about 7 and they couldn’t get back fast enough to get on their routes and start pushing.”
As elsewhere in the region, the dense, pasty snow snapped tree limbs and brought down wires, but Vieira said Pawtucket escaped major calamity.
“We fared pretty well,” he said. Although there could be a few snow showers around today, the forecast for the next few days calls for mostly seasonable weather, with daytime highs in the high 30s and low 40s. Today stays mostly cloudy, but Saturday looks to be at least partly sunny and Sunday the skies grow clearer still.
Old Man Winter may not be done with New England just yet, however. Forecasters have their eye on another low-pressure system – not unlike the last two – that appears poised to be moving up the coast Monday night into Tuesday. The National Weather Service was calling for a 50 percent chance of snow before 10 a.m. Monday, switching over the rain later in the day, then back to snow again at night.
Tuesday also calls for a 40 percent chance of rain and snow. The NWS isn’t going out on a limb this soon with predictions for accumulation of the frozen stuff, but D’Agostino says the city’s private forecasting company – on Wednesday morning, anyway – was calling for 1-3 inches of accumulation during the Monday-Tuesday period.
But it’s not all gloom and doom in the days of ahead. This weekend brings the return of Daylight Savings Time as clocks spring ahead Saturday night, adding another hour of daylight to our already lengthening afternoons. Mornings will seem darker for a while, but that won’t last long as daylight continues to in- crease until June 21, the first day of summer.