Let it snow… let it snow… let it snow…biggest snowstorm since 1922, and still not over.
From the New York Times, a crippled government. Even the post office gave up.
Capital Is Crippled as Blizzard Continues
A winter storm continued its blizzard rage in some parts of the Mid-Atlantic region on Saturday morning, dumping nearly two feet of wet, heavy snow that cut power to about 200,000 residents, caused the roof of a private jet hangar to collapse at Washington Dulles International Airport and forced the nation’s capital into quiet hibernation.
All postal operations in the Washington area, including the suburbs in Northern Virginia and Maryland were canceled on Saturday.
Full story at NYT here
CBS news calls the storm “epic”. See video report below.
From NOAA/NWS
…EXTREMELY DANGEROUS WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS CONTINUE THIS
AFTERNOON AND EVENING FOR THE BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON REGION…EASTERN
PANHANDLE OF WEST VIRGINIA…AND NORTHERN SHENANDOAH VALLEY…
…BLIZZARD CONDITIONS ONGOING IN SOUTHERN MARYLAND…
…POISED TO SET ALL-TIME STORM TOTAL SNOWFALL RECORD FOR
BALTIMORE…
BLIZZARD WARNINGS CONTINUE UNTIL 10 PM FOR MARYLAND EAST OF THE
INTERSTATE 95 CORRIDOR BETWEEN BALTIMORE AND WASHINGTON DC AND WEST
OF THE CHESAPEAKE BAY. WINTER STORM WARNINGS FOR HEAVY SNOW
CONTINUE ELSEWHERE ACROSS THE REGION UNTIL 10 PM.
AT 11:45 AM THIS MORNING…WEATHER OBSERVERS AT BALTIMORE`S THURGOOD
MARSHALL BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT REPORTED 26.5
INCHES OF SNOW ON THE GROUND. THIS IS ONLY 0.3 INCHES SHY OF THE
26.8 INCH RECORD FROM THE PRESIDENTS DAY FEBRUARY 2003 STORM. THE
AIRPORT IS FORECAST TO HAVE AN ADDITIONAL 3 TO 6 INCHES BEFORE THE
STORM ENDS THIS EVENING. A RECORD REPORT WILL BE ISSUED WHEN THE
RECORD IS REACHED.
GENERALLY…24 TO 32 INCHES OF SNOW HAVE FALLEN ACROSS NORTH OF A
LINE BETWEEN ANNAPOLIS MD TO WASHINGTON DC TO PETERSBURG WV. SOUTH
OF THIS LINE TO CHARLOTTESVILLE VA…APPROXIMATELY 14 TO 20 INCHES
HAVE FALLEN.
AN ADDITIONAL 4 TO 8 INCHES WILL FALL ACROSS THE REGION BEFORE THE
SNOW TAPERS TO FLURRIES LATER THIS EVENING. AREAS SOUTH AND EAST OF
BALTIMORE AND WASHINGTON WILL SEE ACCUMULATIONS AT THE HIGHER END
OF THIS RANGE…ALONG WITH WIND GUSTS TO 35 MPH CREATING BLIZZARD
CONDITIONS.
Blizzard Warning
URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC 1002 AM EST SAT FEB 6 2010 DCZ001-MDZ007-011-013-014-062315- /O.CON.KLWX.BZ.W.0001.000000T0000Z-100207T0300Z/ DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA-HARFORD-SOUTHERN BALTIMORE-PRINCE GEORGES- ANNE ARUNDEL- INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...WASHINGTON...BALTIMORE...ANNAPOLIS 1002 AM EST SAT FEB 6 2010 ...BLIZZARD WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 10 PM EST THIS EVENING... A BLIZZARD WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 10 PM EST THIS EVENING. * PRECIPITATION TYPE...MODERATE SNOW. * ACCUMULATIONS...AN ADDITIONAL 4 TO 8 INCHES TODAY WITH TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS OF 20 TO 30 INCHES. * TIMING...MODERATE INTENSITY SNOW BANDS WILL MOVE SOUTHEASTWARD THIS MORNING THROUGH EARLY THIS AFTERNOON. SNOW WILL BECOME LIGHTER THIS AFTERNOON AND WILL TAPER OFF BY EARLY THIS EVENING. * VISIBILITIES...VISIBILITIES AS LOW AS ONE-QUARTER TO ONE-HALF MILE ARE EXPECTED THROUGH EARLY THIS AFTERNOON. * TEMPERATURES...TEMPERATURES WILL REMAIN NEAR 30 DEGREES THIS MORNING AND WILL FALL INTO THE MID TO UPPER 20S TONIGHT. * WINDS...NORTHEAST WINDS 15 MPH WITH GUSTS TO 25 MPH THROUGH THIS AFTERNOON...ESPECIALLY ALONG THE COAST. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... ALTHOUGH WIND SPEEDS WILL DECREASE THROUGH THE DAY...VISIBILITIES WILL BE AT OR BELOW ONE-QUARTER MILE AT TIMES IN MODERATE SNOW... WHICH WILL MAKE TRAVEL VERY DANGEROUS. A BLIZZARD WARNING MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. FALLING AND BLOWING SNOW WITH STRONG WINDS AND POOR VISIBILITIES ARE LIKELY.
I cannot wait for some goon to state that someone at HAARP pressed the wrong button… LOL
[Reply: Already happened. A Pakistani journalist claims there is a HAARP installation near the spot in Norway the strange twirling light in the sky was seen a while ago. RT – Mod]
It´s Climate Change!….or it´s climate changing, or rather changing climate, whatever!, Yes we can!…or was it we could?. anyway we have to wait until next summer….!!
Hey, Steve M. (12:02:56), even the BBC covered the story in their TV News Bulletin (that’s News not Weather) tonight, what motives do you ascribe to them?
James F. Evans (14:48:43) :
You can’t fool Mother Nature.
It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.
“I’m not a conservative (nor am I a liberal besides these terms have different meanings in Canada …
And as for me. I’m whatever Jim Inhofe claims himself to be.
Thank you Mr Watts for letting me say what I feel needs to be said here.
I hope the fans of “Real” Climate etc read such things here and know, there are people who violently oppose what they espouse.
And they’re not going to jam it down the public’s throat, either, with their puppy-dog whimpering about “deniers”
To add insult to injury, I just found this in the accuweather forecast for Tuesday night:
A major ice storm, with a thick coating of ice; breezy late
So they should just about get the power on when it starts going off again.
DC already had snow on the ground from two previous snow storms, I wonder what the the total depth is.
And more snow could hit on Wednesday. What a global warming year!!!
“I thought Al Gore was home in Tennessee… Who is he visiting in D.C. ? :)”
Obama gave a climate change speech about a week ago. Just like Copenhagen, when Obama speaks of climate change, snow balls head for his face.
They have just issued a winter storm watch for my area (Illinois). The NWS thinks the next storm may be as potent for the southern plains into the midwest.
Also – it appears as though every river from eastern Texas to North Carolina to northern Florida is in flood stage. El Nino sure can be a game changer in the winter.
Hi Anthony.
I am glad you removed the comment I quoted from ‘Brian G Valentine (11:34:27).’
Like I said, it was not worthy of your outstanding site.
Only, now it looks like I made a comment you found unacceptable, instead of quoting one and asking you to remove it.
By the way, the same comment was quoted by ‘Murray (11:48:39).’ You may want to remove it there too.
tallbloke (11:08:08) : My thoughts are with the people in rural areas suffering power cuts. I hope everyone stays safe and warm.
While I appreciate the sentiment, I can’t understand why folks just sit back and “take it”. I live in “earthquake country” and owned 2 generators up until a year ago when I sold one to a friend. For about 4 months power bill, I bought a very nice Honda generator. In several quake and storm (and one car crash) related power outages I’ve had the ‘terrible duty” of walking out the back door and pulling a starter cord on the generator…
I sold the 5 KW “Coleman” not because there was any issue with it, but because the 1 KW Honda let me run everything but the A/C and washer / drier and I just could not justify the need to have A/C and drier in a “crisis”… Oh, and the Honda was way quite while the Coleman was kind of loud…
So, while during the “Loma Pieita” quake:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake
also known as the World Series Quake, I ran the Coleman (that cost me all of about $350 on clearance) and had Satellite TV, washer, drier, fridge, AC, lighting, and more; the fact is that the 1 kw Honda did more than I needed during all sorts of other outages.
So I sold the 5 kW job largely because I really didn’t need that much power or redundancy. Also, I’d gotten a 1 kw inverter at Costco for about $70 so I could run everything off the car generator if I really felt like it. (Modulo doing the dishwasher, cloths washer, dryer et.al. all at the same time…)
At the end of it all, it really is not all that hard to “make your own power” even if it is just a $70 inverter bolted to the car battery in the garage.
So yes, I feel for the folks “having issues”. I’ve been there. But at the same time it’s incredibly easy to deal with ‘electricity outages” with just a tiny bit of preparation.
(And yes, I know I’m “over the top” with having had 2 generators AND a 1 kW inverter AND 2 inverters of about 200 w capacity for travel… I’m compulsive like that… but it is cheap and easy to do.)
The death of global warming, the snow is the icing on the cake!
At least Obama is in residence this time rather than being in the less snow-challenged Hawaii! It won’t happen, but I would like someone to rub his nose in it.
It is easy to excuse politicians because we all know they are ‘dumb’, but it can be more fruitful to know if they or there friends [or donors] are making money out of any particular policy.
@tallbloke (11:08:08) : My thoughts are with the people in rural areas suffering power cuts. I hope everyone stays safe and warm.
There are around 100,000 in my area still without power. I have 5 teenagers spending the night at my house–my own plus a couple of neighbors. No power=no heat, and it’s going down to 5 degrees F tonight. So they’re staying here. They live two doors up–I have power, they don’t…we’re on different grids.
Murray (11:42:28) : Anthony, give us a break. Why “completely out of bounds’? Perhaps “slightly skewed”? Maybe your original posting has no editorial content, but your readership and contributors largely equate warmist with liberal and skeptic with conservative and you get lots of conservative political comments or innuendos which don’t get commented on or snipped.
Oh Pahleeeze… Look, I’m a “California Conservative” which makes me a flaming liberal in he eyes of my Texas Uncle.
I think MEN have no right what so ever to step into the decision between a woman and her doctor. I think smoking grass ought to be legal and anyone who doesn’t mind losing their short term memory for a ‘good time’ is making a choice of them, not for me, so why ought I to have any say? Further, I don’t see where it makes any rational sense to let folks rot in prison for selling drugs, buying drugs, using drugs, or either being or patronizing prostitutes or, for that matter, doing ANYTHING that does not harm me personally.
Further, I’d even go so far as to assert that their ought to be a ‘minimal safety net’ offered to everyone in the nation to assure that they have (even if low quality and unpleasant to assure nobody exploits it) minimal food, housing, and healthcare.
Yet folks accuse ME of being “conservative”. Heck, I voted for Obama in the California primary. (I was an ABC voter… Anyone But Clinton 😉
So please, take your stereotype viewpoint and stuff it. Anthony is more interested in thermometer site quality than political view and as near as I can tell, the only folks trying to make a ‘skeptical’ viewpoint into a “republican” one are the AGW true believers.
Lord knows I think the Republicans are a piece of work. Only slightly outdone by the Democrats. I’m a registered Independent (who are allowed to vote for Democrats in the California primary, but not Republican… go figure…) and not about to endorse conservatives carte blanch.
So cut Anthony some slack. He reports weather and climate stuff Just Fine. Even acceptable to a California audience where “Snow” has a whole different and much warmer meaning 😉
Philadelphia reported 26.7 inches, about the same as Baltimore reported. But Washington DC reported only 20+ inches when I watched network news at 6 pm. Are they censoring a truly historical snowfall so their brainwashed AGW devotees won’t start wondering if they have been duped?
pwl 14:07:26
Excellent, excellent post.
Thank you, and thanks to this blog for providing an intelligent forum.
In a lighter vein, as I was shoveling today (until 8 p.m.!) with neighbors here in VA outside DC, I kept chanting to myself “fragile nature….FRAGILE Nature….fragile, fragile Nature…huff, puff….FRAGILE…”
lolol
You are not all that “over the top”, I have 2 large deep cycle 12V batteries on float charge continuously (to run my ham radio gear), and two 750 watt inverters and two 100 watt inverters (one for each car), plus another 100 w inverter in my laptop case.
I also have 20W of 12 volt solar chargers that I can use to augment the 12 volt power available from the cars when the weather cooperates. I have a enough LED lights to function quite nicely with as well. A single LED lantern will run for a week continuously on 4 AA batteries.
I need to pickup a small portable generator, I am looking for something like the quiet Honda generators with small enough power output to make it have very low fuel consumption. If you live a low power consumption life style, you only need about 500-750 watts of power to run even the big essentials. I have a small electronic peltier junction refrigerator that only takes a couple hundred watts, which can keep things like milk cold. The ice in the freezer will keep the frozen food frozen for several days if I am bright enough not to open the door.
A standard freezer/refrigerator (if one of the energy efficient designs) only needs about 600 watts, (the frostless styles, and automatic ice makers use more) and you only need to run it a couple times a day in an emergency, when you don’t need power for lights or other uses.
I keep a 2 liter soda pop bottle of water frozen in the freezer to extend its power off time without having melting ice drip all over everything.
A car’s alternator can deliver from 360-500 watts at fast idle, as long as your fuel lasts.
It takes less than 200 watts to run the desk top computer , monitor and cable modem, for typical browsing, and only about 100 watts to run the laptop continuously.
Making your house hold power independent for 48 -96 hours is really very easy, and as you say cheap peace of mind. If we have a power outage I hardly notice it.
Larry
Re “Are they censoring a truly historical snowfall so their brainwashed AGW devotees won’t start wondering if they have been duped?” The low snow totals at National Airport have been discussed extensively. There is certainly less at 5 feet above sea level than there was at the old measuring point in DC. Now DC is a bigger heat island but still got 20-24 inches from what I read earlier at capitalweathergang. National Airport said 17.8 inches.
…DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA…
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY 27.5 600 PM 2/06
1 SW AMERICAN UNIVER 25.0 715 PM 2/06
VIRGINIA
…ARLINGTON COUNTY…
1 SW BALLSTON 28.0 600 PM 2/06
1 NNE BAILEYS CROSSR 24.1 450 PM 2/06
1 ENE FALLS CHURCH 22.0 700 PM 2/06 AVERAGE DEPTH
2 E BARCROFT 19.8 718 PM 2/06
2 ESE BARCROFT 18.0 630 PM 2/06 SNOW DEPTH
1 W ROSSLYN 18.0 400 PM 2/06
REAGAN NATIONAL AIRP 17.8 600 PM 2/06
On the other hand, places like Rosslyn, also down on the tidal Potomac got 18 so that lines up with National in this case.
Down here east of El Paso Texas several of us spent a wonderful day hikeing around the tops of almost barren desert mountains near a canyon in which a three day extreme bike riding event is being held.
http://www.roughriderracing.org/index.html
On one tall hilltop are our two and only wind generating towers, not a peep out of either one durning our 8.6 mile 7.5 hour hike. Neither set of blades moved all day. Warm sunny day, short sleeve shirt weather. Wonderful feeling, enjoying the fantastic warm weather while the loones in DC get dumped on! Hope for an even larger snow storm up there, hopefully very soon. Keep them (big storms) coming!
Probably you mean literally “on different spokes of the power distribution system“.
Elaborating, power is distributed from substations to nrighborhoods on more of a “hub and spoke” model (think: old wagon wheel) –
– and “a grid” (think: lines in an infinite rectilinear x – y pattern), per se, is done more at a transmission level, between load centers (areas of population or industrial centers) and at the substation and generation level to be a little more specific, and it is done so for the ‘security’ aspect of power generation … folks in the power industry use the word ‘security’ when they actually should use the word reliability (power is there) and stability (very close to the intended 60 Hz without generation surges), but the word ‘security’ is historic so there we are …
The larger systems are interconnected in a ‘grid’ configuration primarily to provide ‘backup’ in the case of generation going down … with a ‘grid’ configuration generation in an adjacent system can absorb the ‘loss’ of a ‘generator’ without the entire service area losing power … with large interconnection areas (a large grid) the loss of a single generator contributes only a small load increase to all the generators still connected to said grid.
Just trying to contribute a little to the discussion going on here; not all loss of ‘power’ literally involves ‘the grid’!
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On another site someone came up with an expression “green collar workers” which perfectly describes the advocates of the AGW nonsense. :+}
Of course, we can always ‘hope to change’ that to ‘orange collar workers’…
Steve M. (11:03:47) : “Er, dude? I’m here in Manhattan and there’s been NO SNOW WHATSOEVER. There’s no snow north of here — y’know, in upstate New York, where it’s supposed to snow a lot in February? And in New England, ditto?”
You have no idea what you are talking about….but that’s OK.
Come Wednesday of this week it won’t matter anyways because you and NYC will be digging out.
Apart from that…why don’t you take a few minutes to look at the near record or record snowfall years for NYC in the past 10-15 years….and maybe you will recant.
But even if you don’t…the VERY REASON you ain’t getting snow, mate, is because the storm track has been to your SOUTH….prima facie evidence that the cold is pretty significant, and not “normal” New England winter.
Brrrrrr. And Grrrrrrr.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
rbateman (15:03:26) :
“Actually, shutting down Washington was Hansen’s idea a year ago in a snowstorm.”
It was LESS than a year ago, Rob. (11 months) My, how time flies. Can’t get out of one winter without getting stuck in another one. LOL
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
_Jim (21:08:05) :
Stop being legalistic, _Jim. Appreciate your technical analysis, but this is not a time to analyze whether the terminology is correct.
More important is to make sure people don’t freeze to death. Geez.
NOTE: How much we are dependent upon energy sources keep us warm! thanks for all who work to maintain and make life livable on this planet (i.e the scientists and engineers).