"Heart Attack" Snow Needs To Be Cleared In Vermont, Be Careful

Wet snow falls Saturday evening in St. Albans, Vermont,
clinging to every branch and tree.

The almost-ended snowstorm in Vermont we had this weekend is going to be remembered a real back breaker.   

This was one of the most sopping wet, slushy snowstorms we've had in recent years.  The water content of the snow was super high. In places that got a lot of snow, that means it's going to be hard to clean up. 

Definitely get some young buff person to shovel your driveway if you have any concerns about your heart, or if you are just out of shape. 

A for example of the wetness of this snow: Rochester, Vermont got 16.5 inches of snow, and it had a water content of 1.38 inches. 

The big winners at latest report for snow in Vermont were 19 inches in Warren; 18.5 inches in East Dover and Stratton; 17 inches in Readsboro and 15 inches in Moretown and Mount Holly. 

Lower elevations had rain mixed in, lowering the snow totals.  My place in St. Albans, Vermont had 4.2 inches, most of which came last evening and overnight. 

Burlington managed 3.2 inches of snow on Saturday with the temperature never once falling below freezing all day - the low temperature Saturday was 33 degrees.

The heavy, wet snow not surprisingly caused trouble with trees and power lines. That 4.2 inches here in St. Albans was so wet and heavy that it broke a few small branches. That small amount of snow under normal circumstances would never have been nearly enough to cause that. 

You can imagine what more than a foot of slush can do.   There were still more than 3,000 homes and businesses without power in Vermont as of late morning Sunday.  There was a report from Warren this morning that a section of Route 100 was closed because several transformers and wires were arcing, setting fire to some trees.

It's still warm out for one more day as the cold air behind the storm is very much lagging.  So there will be more slush to deal with until it turns to ice tonight. 

Just a little more than four inches of new snow is so wet
it is greatly weighing down trees in 
St. Albans, Vermont today. 

There will still be those upslope snows going in the Green Mountains all day, so a few more inches might pile up there.  The Northeast Kingdom got mostly cheated by this storm, as the lower elevations there got a fair amount of rain.

A couple inches might accumulate there today. 

It's been a remarkably warm January so far, but today is the last of it. 

We're in for an extended period of much more normal temperatures for January.  After today, high temperatures will stay below freezing for the foreseeable future, and nights will get into the single numbers and teens. 

We might finally get to the point later in the week, or more likely later in the month, in which temperatures actually get below zero. That's not guaranteed, but it's possible.  I still see no sign of any of those epic cold waves Vermont sometimes gets, the kind where it gets into the 20s and 30s below zero. 

Unless there's a surprise, we won't see anything like that this month. 

Not weird for Vermont this time of year, but weird that we've gone so long without such chilly nights. 

There's also no sign of any other big storms for at least the next week.  Instead, we'll deal with moisture starved little "Alberta Clippers" coming in from the west and northwest.  Each one will toss a handful or two of snowflakes at us, but nothing wild.

The strongest of these clippers should come by around Thursday, and that one could bring some very light accumulations to the valleys, and perhaps a few inches in the mountains. 

For sure, though, if you want to play around in the snow we just got, you have time to do it. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.