A Big Snow (for Cape Cod)

The big storm that was forecast for yesterday and today hit right on schedule and for Eastern Massachusetts, it seems like the weather forecasters were right on the money. We got a lot of snow and a lot of wind. That combination makes a blizzard and no one who knew it was coming wanted to be out in it. It snowed all night and the wind blew it around with gusts of up to 58 mph. It was supposed to stop snowing around noon but it didn't. I took these pictures around 10 AM.

It was hard to walk around in our yard. There were a few low places that the wind scoured out but those places didn't go where I wanted to go and there weren't that many of them. My guess is that we got about 18 - 24 inches. It's hard to be sure because there were drifts well over 48 inches high and bare places with barely a few inches. I know people in other parts of the country and Canada would laugh at our inability to deal with this amount of snow but we're just not used to it. Plus, this winter has seen particularly little snow so far. So, this was a shock. In the picture to the left, you can see how little snow is on the cars and how much has drifted up around them. But it's not all drifts because it's about that deep over most of our yard.

This next picture shows the drift in front of (and on top of) my mother-in-law's part of the house. She won't be using her front door. The last picture shows our front porch and how the snow drifted up in front of the porch higher than the porch itself. My son and I started to dig out the driveway and got within a few feet of the road when the wind and cold got to us.

We've come in to warm up a bit but I wonder if we're going to go out again tonight. It's getting dark and the snow is still coming. The wind has died down but there are still gusts once in a while. My office was closed today. It was nice not to have to feel guilty about not going in or rushing to try to get there. But work is on for tomorrow and I may be taking vacation time to do some more shoveling. We'll see.

Just click on the pictures to see them full size.

[Update: The reports on TV news say our town got 24-25 inches of snow]