US Hallowe'en celebrations have been dampened by heavy snowfall. Photo Credit: dannnnnnny, http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannnnny/2090004936/sizes/m/in/photostream/
The US is pretty used to extreme snow — blizzards pummel the East Coast every year — but snow this early in the year is very unusual. Snowy, windy weather began on Saturday and intensified yesterday, leaving a blanket of snow across much of the US East Coast. The snowfall broke the record for October, The Guardian reported, and has so far left eleven people dead and millions without electricity — transport links up and down the coast were severed and children were warned against going out trick or treating.
A snowy Halloween? Come off it. Up until Friday, The New York Times’s were “skeptical” about the idea of a “white Hallowe’en.” And when the snowfall started on Saturday, they were still shocked — the lede of their report read “October, said the calendar. Before Hallowe’en … Yet snow was falling. Not a light, mischievous form of frozen precipitation, either, but heavy, wet flakes.”
Poor trees! Andrew C. Revkin of The New York Times’ Dot Earth blog, was similarly surprised to see “white snow on green leaves.” Another report by The New York Times indicated that New York’s Central Park might lose 1,000 trees and that “even the most durable trees struggled to cope.”
A record snowfall for Connecticut. The Yale Daily News reported a “record” snowfall in Connecticut”, smashing the previous record for October (9.5 inches) with a staggering count of over 20 inches in the northern part of the state. New Haven Police Department spokesman David Hartman said that the city of New Haven, Connecticut had managed to “stay ahead of the storm so far” in terms of preparedness — Yale managed to play Columbia for their annual football game on Saturday.
Halloween is cancelled … or postponed. Today was “one of the earliest snow days in living memory”, said Michael Mella for NBC Connecticut, who reported that “local officials in many towns have canceled or postponed Halloween activities, fearful that young trick-or-treaters could wander into areas with downed power lines or trees ready to topple over.” For example, the governor’s house in Hartford, Connecticut will not give out candy. “No amount of candy is worth a potentially serious or even fatal accident”, reminded Governor Dan Malloy.
But the snow won’t stick. The northern state of Maine’s Portland Press Herald assured Mainers that weather station technician Butch Roberts had advised them that all would soon be well; he expected that the snow wouldn’t “stick around long because the ground is warm and temperatures should moderate into more fall-like numbers as the week progresses.”
