Snowfall turns the lights out on residents

Author: Andrea Glaessner

Last Tuesday, instead of the daily dose of rain that had been dousing the Northeast Region for the past two weeks, the skies opened up and surprised Vermonters with an unseasonably early snowstorm. Though Middlebury residents only saw flurries, which melted before they even saw the sun, snow accumulated to as much as two feet in areas of Vermont with a higher elevation.

The snowstorm was a bit out of the ordinary for a typical fall according to weather prediction experts. Meteorologist Chris Bouchard explained, "It's pretty unusual to see a snowfall as large and early as this one."

As far as interpreting the random snowstorm to be an indication of a particularly frigid winter, he noted that "it's just not possible to make that kind of prediction, scientifically."

Despite the seemingly mild effect of the storm here in Middlebury, other rural Vermont residents felt the effects of the storm to a greater extent, not just in the large quantity of snowfall, but also in the loss of electricity.

According to The Addison Independent, "Nearly 40,000 customers of Central Vermont Public Service Corp. - including more than 8,000 in Addison County - lost power."

Thankfully, power was finally restored to all residents by the end of last weekend.

Yet power was not restored fast enough to avoid affecting schools. The Addison Independent reported that the lack of power prompted the Addison Northeast Supervisory Union and the Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union to close all the schools in their respective districts on Wednesday and that Ripton Elementary School opened late for the same reason.

Due to the early arrival of the storm, many trees were still full of foliage. Thus the trees were exceptionally heavy when they fell, covered in thick snow, onto power lines in the blustering storm.

The Independent reported that the storm caused the worst fall snow storm damage the CVPS company has seen since October of 1987, when 25,000 customers lost service in an early season snowfall.

For many Vermonters, the early snowfall was an ominous reminder of the approaching end of fall. Residents already felt cheated by the seemingly shortened version of the spectacular changing of the leaves due to the incessant rainfall these past few weeks. Jennifer Williams, '08 was disappointed to miss out on an elongated fall saying, "I wanted to play in the leaves more and it just wouldn't stop raining. Nobody can really enjoy fall indoors the whole time."

But we cannot entirely blame the heavy rainstorms for the shortened foliage season. According to Bouchard, "Foliage depends on sun angle. [The short season] mostly had to do with the fact that it was so warm this month that it took awhile for the leaves to start changing. We didn't have cool nights in which the leaves could transform until the middle of this month." Inevitably, according to Bouchard all the leaves changed at once a lot quicker than usual and the big winds that accompany increment weather compounded the issue, ripping leaves off many trees almost as soon as they changed.

Overall these weather patterns are normal systems in the changing of the seasons, a quality of Vermont that all residents cherish, no matter how extreme the weather changes are.