Anyway, the February 2013 New England Nor'easter (I won't call it by the name the Weather Channel gave it, not matter how cute it was, because I have no respect for the Weather Channel) turned up about three weeks ago now. That's hard to believe, seeing at there are still piles of snow out there from what was pushed off the roads and out of parking lots, and that's with all yesterday's rain.
Something that completely shocked me about the whole thing was the government response to the storm -- they ordered people off the roads, threatened them with jailtime even. Now, it was pretty well know that the cops weren't going to go looking for you, they were busy enough, but it made the point: stay home, it's serious.
Well I did stay home Friday. Word had gotten around that SEAS was going to be shutting down a 2:00 (by 9:00 Thursday night that'd changed to noon), and since I knew darn well no one was going to be getting anything done before noon anyway, I figured I'd be more productive if I didn't bother to walk in.
That gave me the chance to snap photos hour by hour as things started up.
9:30 Friday morning the lot looked like this:
Then at 2:00
At 5:00
And right before I went to bed at 11:00.
Though you can't see it in the photo, the wind had gone absolutely mad at this point, and power outages were taking hold. I wasn't expecting to make it to morning with the lights still on, and had prepped. Being from the Midwest gave me a lot of outage experience, though I maybe leaned a little heavy on the generator and now I miss it.
But the lights didn't go out, and in the morning I woke up to:
That was about 19" of snow, according to my own measurement. Accuracy was basically out the door, though, as it had drifted so bad that there really weren't any pristine areas.
Watching people walk their dogs in this was hilarious. I saw a huge black dog, approximately the size of a small horse, just sit down and refuse to budge, even when his owner had slogged through the snow to the relatively clear parking lot and called to him. I saw a Yorkie leap with abandon into the snow only to decide that maybe that was a bad idea. And then the little kids were all having just an unfair amount of fun.
I ran out real quick in my jacket and slippers to take measurements and get a couple outside shots -- or so I'd intended, the only door that I could easily get out of was the front door. The back lot door looked like this (stuck slightly open, by the by):
And the door by the trash cans like this:
The peak of that big drift is probably right around the 5' mark.
These folks had the right idea: cross country skis:
Keep in mind that the snow wasn't through at this point. The final totals for Boston were about 25", though we had nothing on Hamden, CT -- 40".
Sunday morning dawned very bright, so I decided to take the opportunity to get out and get photos before things started to melt and get ugly. I'm not going to narrate these, they speak pretty well for themselves. They're in a loop from the apartment, down Concord to Harvard Square and back up through campus and then to Mass Ave.
As I mentioned, a good deal of the snow piles are still around; the largest I saw in my rambling was probably about 15' tall (since trucked away).
You've probably heard in the news about people out this way complaining about how snow removal was handled. They should all go live in Ohio for a winter. Seriously; I've seen worse roads (recently!) in Ohio when there was only an inch of snow. They did an excellent job with what they got thrown at them.
Walking was a challenge Monday morning, but not too awful. The biggest issue was the few corners where no one had shoveled from the walk to the road. Monday afternoon was a different story. It rained. It rained on packed snow. It was like wading in a swimming pool built on an ice rink.
But from then it got better. It's slowly gone away -- when it's not being added to -- and there are signs that, hey, Spring might show up yet.
So that was the blizzard of '13.
