Not-So-Scary Vermont Halloween Forecast, But Past Years Served Up Some Frights

I guess this will do for a Halloween illustration. Gloomy,
misty, stormy and dark with a tilting tree ready to
pounce on passersby, or block the escape route
from the Haunted Mansion. Spoiler: Halloween weather
in Vermont this evening will be anything but scary 

 It's Halloween, and all the kiddies want to get as much loot as possible as they spook our neighborhoods trick or treating.   

If the weather is good, it makes this "task" easier.

I'm happy to report that this Halloween will feature Vermont weather that is decidedly better than the weather on most Halloweens.

Temperatures this evening will be somewhere in the 50s, which is definitely on the warm side for this time of year. It might rain a tiny bit, but probably after 11 p.m., when most kids are already in a candy coma. 

The days around Halloween have often stirred up some historically scary weather in much of the nation in recent decades, but aside from one notable exception in 2019, Vermont Halloweens have been more treat that trick. 

More on that in a moment. 

Here in the Green Mountain State, trick or treaters usually face evening weather with temperatures in the 40s.  It's an unsettled time of year, with spooky Ma Nature often stirring the pot with rain and sometimes even snow.

Overnight lows don't usually conjure up the spirit of how chilly or warm it is during peak trick or treating hours. So I go with daytime highs, as the temperature will probably be just a bit lower than the high temperature that day.

The most wintry Halloween was in 1913, when the high temperature that day was 32 degrees. A close second is 1975, when readings stayed in the low to mid 30s all day, with persistent snow flurries. 

The snowiest Halloween was in 1993. Burlington had 1.3 inches of snow that day. It was part of a wild early seasons snow that started Halloween evening and continued into November 1 and deposited nine inches of snow on Burlington.

I remember that snowy Halloween evening as I was on the Church Street Marketplace in Burlington having a snowball fight with a nun, a prostitute, Frankenstein, Michael Jackson and Kurt Cobain. 

Yeah, one of my more bizarro experiences. 

SCARY HALLOWEEN, 2019

The warmest Halloween was in 2019, when the high temperature was 71 degrees. Sounds great, right? Nope! It was probably the most frightening Halloween on record in Vermont. At least in terms of weather. 

A storm that 2019 Halloween also spread torrential rains into Vermont, causing a disastrous flood, especially along and north of Route 2.

Burlington had a whopping 3.3 inches of rain, mostly during the evening of October 31. Rainfall totals were as high as 5.26 inches in East Berkshire. 

Urban flooding started the night, and that quickly translated to stream and river flooding. Eight area rivers reached moderate to major flood stage, with the Missisquoi at North Troy hitting a record high crest. 

Extensive flooding was seen along the Missisquoi, Lamoille, Winooski rivers in Vermont and Ausable River in New York. 

More than 300 Vermont homes suffered flood damage and public infrastructure losses due to the flooding amounted to $5 million. 

The back side of the storm featured damaging winds that caused widespread damage across much of Vermont. More than 120,000 homes and businesses lost power, including my own. 

I've owned my house since 2007 and this was the only time I've had to file an insurance claim due to storm damage. Definitely a scary Halloween in 2019.

Other epic storms have slapped the Northeast around Halloween in recent decades.  Ma Nature knows how to turn up the fright. 

PERFECT STORM, HALLOWEEN 1991

Late October, 1991 brought the famous "Perfect Storm" to the Northeast. The storm inspired the book and movie about the sinking of the Andrea Gail, in which six fishermen lost their lives.

The Perfect Storm stayed offshore, but was so strong that it caused coastal destruction from the Canadian Maritimes to Florida. A total of 13 people died, and hundreds of homes and other buildings along the coast were damaged or destroyed.

The man who would later become my husband ignored evacuation warnings and stayed during the storm at a beach front home in Matunuck, Rhode Island.  Stacked concrete blocks, measuring four feet by four feet, protected the home, or so he thought.

Jeff somehow slept through the storm. He woke up to find the Perfect Storm had swept away or sank these heavy concrete blocks. They'd disappeared.  That's the power of that storm.  

Meanwhile,  in that 1991 Halloween season, well to the west, a historic blizzard would bury Minnesota and other areas in record amounts of snow. Here in Vermont, we escaped both storms. It was just seasonably breezy and chilly here. 

SUPERSTORM SANDY, 2012

A little before Halloween, 2012, Superstorm Sandy, off the Mid-Atlantic Coast, made its now infamous left hook and slammed into the Jersey shore on October 29, causing one of the worst disasters on record in that region. 

The storm caused 285 deaths, with 125 of those in the United States. Storm surges in New Jersey and New York were up to 14 feet above normal low tide. Thousands of homes were destroyed or severely damaged

The storm flooded 17 percent of New York City's land mass and inundated many subway tunnels. It took eight years to fully repair that damage.

The huge size of Sandy allowed it to cause wind damage as far west as Michigan and Wisconsin and as far north as Ontario and Quebec. 

Here in Vermont, damage was limited to fallen trees and power lines. Up to 35,000 Vermont homes and businesses lost power. Route 9 west of Brattleboro was closed for a time due to fallen trees.  A spook but a kill for the Green Mountain State.

Given the history of frightening storms around Halloween, we should all enjoy the treat of benign weather this year. 

Vermont October Was Among The Warmest. It Was Also Wet With Halloween Super Soaker

November is supposed to be stick season in Vermont, but this
morning, November 1 in St. Albans, plenty of leaves still on
trees after one of the warmest Octobers on record

October, 2021 ended yesterday on a somewhat mild, but very, very wet note as a soaker of a storm brought the month's rainfall totals to above normal levels.  

And if you thought October was awfully warm, you're right. It was among the warmest on record.

Before we get into October's climate, I do have to note all that rain yesterday. 

It was the second wettest Halloween on record. Only the destructive Halloween flooding of 2019 was worse. This time, the flooding mostly happened just to our east in Maine.

There was some minor flooding here and there in Vermont.  I do see that Route 116 in Bristol was down to one lane for a time yesterday due to high water. That was typical of the drainage problem we had from the day's soaking. Several rivers are or were at bank full, but I haven't seen any reports of any real damage.

Rainfall totals in Vermont were impressive. Not all the numbers are in yet but it was a lot of rain. For instance, Fletcher reported 2.75 inches of rain over the weekend. Storm totals reached two inches in Burlington. 

Over in Maine, as much as 6.8 inches of rain fell there, resulting in some damaging floods.

OCTOBER SUMMARY

For October, 2021 as a whole, the average temperature in Burlington was 55.6 degrees, making it the fourth warmest on record.

For comparison, the warmest October on record was in 2017, with a mean temperature of 58.6 degrees. It seemed to me we were on track for the warmest October on record this year, but the final 10 days of the month were fairly close to average, blunting the warmth we had earlier in the month. 

I'm sure Montpelier and St. Johnsbury both had one of their top 10 warmest Octobers on record too, as Montpelier was a whopping 7.5 degrees warmer than normal and St. J was 5.5 degrees on the warm side.

It's been a warm year. Unless November and December are quite a bit colder than average, this year will probably be among the top 10 warmest on record at Burlington. 

This next bit is much more subjective than the above stats, but I've never seen a year in which leaves were on the trees for such a long period. I first started seeing some trees start to leaf out in mid-April, which was earlier than I can remember.

As of this morning, November 1, some sugar maples are hanging on to some colorful leaves, and some oak and poplar trees still have green leaves, which is very odd for the opening of November

All that rain yesterday was the main driver in bringing the month's precipitation to above average levels. Burlington's October rainfall amounted to 5.49 inches, which was 1.66 inches on the wet side. We did ot quite make it into the top 10 list of wettest Octobers.

It was a bit drier in central and eastern Vermont, but still fairly wet. Montpelier and St Johnsbury were both more than a half inch on the wet side. 

 As of last Thursday, a small portion of Vermont near the International Border was still in moderate drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.  A larger area, roughly the northeastern half of Vermont, was still considered abnormally dry.

But soil moisture had been improving with rains last week, and that super soaker over this past weekend really helped with ground water, I imagine. 

The Woof River, the little stream that runs by my house in St. Albans, is running vigorously for the first time this year. It's even healthier looking than it was during the spring thaw.  Little rivulets are running through parts of my property that are normally dry.  So this rain surely helped erase at least some of the last vestiges of this year's drought.

Usually, low elevations get at least a trace of snow in October, but not this year. Only the tippy top of the mountains saw some whitening.

Looking at the opening days of November, the month will start off on the cooler than average side, but it won't be anywhere near as cold as it can get this time of year. We'll run about five degrees on the cool side for the next week or so, with highs in the 40s and lows in the upper 20s to mid 30s. Nothing odd for this time of year.

After all that rain we just had, it's looking like we'll have an extended dry spell, with only light rain and snow showers in the forecast for the next week or so.

 

Final Days Of October Seem To Inspire Historic Vermont/Northeast Storms

Damage from this week's nor'easter in New England. Photo 
via Twitter from Michael Farragamo

The second of two major storms have just hit the East Coast within one week.  

The first a nor'easter with a peak wind gust of 94 mph blasted Massachusetts Tuesday and Wednesday.  Power is still out to some homes after the winds tore down innumerable trees and power lines. 

A second storm yesterday brought winds of up the 60 mph on the Jersey Shore and caused some damaging coastal flooding through the Mid-Atlantic states.  The flooding was among the worst on record, with some areas reporting among the top five storm surges in history 

Neither storm is having much of an effect on Vermont. The one that blasted the Mid-Atlantic States yesterday is forecast to dump an inch or more of rain on the Green Mountain State by tomorrow afternoon. Winds could gust over 40 mph in some areas, especially near the western slopes of the Green Mountains in this storm. 

So we get a fairly notable storm, but nothing extreme for Vermont. There might be a bit of minor flooding, and some isolated tree and power line damage. Luckily, this storm won't be as bad as it was further south yesterday.

This is history repeating itself, though.  There's something about the days around Halloween in the northeast that scare up some intense, historic storms. There's  been a ton of them.  Several of these storms cost hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars, not to mention lost lives.

Here's a bit of a trip down memory lane with these (mostly) recent October storms. 

The Perfect Storm, October 31-November 2, 1991:  This of course is the storm made famous by the book and movie about the sinking of the fishing boat Andrea Gail during the raging storm that resulted in five deaths on the boat, part of a total storm death toll of 13.  

A tropical storm teamed up with a another non-tropical system to produce an immense storm offshore of New England. The storm produced winds of 75 mph on the coast, but worse, caused a devastating storm surge that caused upwards of $200 million in damage.

Halloween Snowstorm, October 29-31, 2011

Damage from a massive late October, 2011 snowstorm in
Glastonbury Ct. Photo by Jessica Hill/AP

Much like this year, autumn that year was warm in New England and other parts of the Northeast.  That meant that leaves stayed on the trees late into the season.  

Then a strong nor'easter got going off the coast, and pulled down some very chilly air from Canada. The result was a stripe of very heavy snow from northeastern Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey up through central and southern New England.

Northern New Jersey, southern New York, southern Vermont and New Hampshire and much of Massachusetts and Connecticut received 10 to 20 inches of wet, heavy snow. Peru, Massachusetts was smothered beneath 32 inches of snow. 

This all fell on those trees, the weight collecting on all those leaves still up there, and many of those trees collapsed under the burden. Over one million people in Connecticut alone lost electricity. Some people in the entire snow zone were without power for a week or more. 

Superstorm Sandy October 28-30, 2012

The sprawling storm, consisting of a hurricane making a transition to a non-tropical system took a weird path and made a left hand hook from the Atlantic into New Jersey on October 29, 2012.  It was one of the worst storms in American history. 

Superstorm Sandy killed 75 Americans, with an additional 72 deaths in the Caribbean earlier when Sandy was a hurricane. The storm destroyed 650,000 homes, and caused $70.2 billion in damage, mostly in New Jersey and New York.

Here in Vermont, we suffered just a glancing blow from Sandy, with power outages mostly across southern parts of the state.

Workers patch up a Milton, Vermont roof after a severe 
windstorm in October, 2017.

Bomb Cyclone, October 29-30, 2017

Another nor'easter developed explosively along the coast, causing widespread damage in and around New England.  

As we've seen in the past week, nor'easters often cause strong winds along the coast. If conditions are just right, these winds come way inland. And they did in this case.

Here in Vermont, strong, damaging winds are common right along the west slopes of the Green Mountains. This time, these downslope winds extended all the way to Lake Champlain, with destructive results. 

More than 150,000 Vermonters, one fourth the state's population, lost electricity.  Hundreds of Vermont homes suffered damage like lost shingles, sections of roofs gone, siding torn off or falling trees crashing into them. Winds gusted to 131 mph atop Mount Mansfield, 78 mph in Wells, Vermont and 63 mph in Burlington.

The storm also caused wind damage throughout New England, and destructive flooding in parts of New Hampshire and Maine.

Intense Vermont Flooding, Wind, October 31-November 1 2019

This tree uprooted and destroyed an SUV in our
St Albans, Vermont yard on November 1, 2019.

This storm, for a change, was not a nor'easter but still caused enormous havoc in Vermont. Parts of Vermont were declared disaster areas due to the worst flooding the state had seen since the devastating Tropical Storm Irene floods of 2011. 

Sections of two rivers in northern Vermont reached record crests. Numerous roads were washed out and dozens of homes and businesses were severely damaged by the flooding. 

Bridge replacement work continues to this day in Williston due to this storm.

The storm packed a one-two punch, first with the severe flooding and second with damaging winds. A number of properties in Vermont that escaped the flooding were damaged by the wind. This included my own place, where one of our vehicles was destroyed by a falling tree and our house suffered minor damage.