Five days after a Christmas Eve in the 70s, the Northeast is getting its first taste of winter today.
Snow, sleet and freezing rain made for slick travel Tuesday morning, which resulted in numerous accidents and caused a slew of minor localized power outages, most due to ice-laden power lines snapping under the weight of the frozen water.
State Police Troop G spokesperson Trooper Mark Cepiel: "It was just about what we expected as far as cars off the road and situations when there are adverse weather conditions."
State police responded to more than two dozen road mishaps on Albany-area highways. "There was a decrease in traffic though, 'cause most schools and school-related activities are off for the holiday." Cepiel attributes many of the minor incidents involving cars that skidded off the roads or got stuck to inefficient equipment. "Not changing tires over to snow tires."
Police across the Northeast responded to hundreds of weather-related road mishaps. "Since midnight for today, up until 2 p.m., as far as property damage, so cars off the roadway, minor fender-benders, that sort of thing, in the Troop G area, which is the Greater Capital District and the North Country, we've had 168 incidents and 27 vehicles that became disabled, mechanical, something along those lines, that we rendered assistance to, and of course we had the one fatality."
That fatality occurred in the wee hours along I-90 when a 22-year-old man’s vehicle collided with a Fed Ex tandem trailer. Snow and sleet were falling around the time of the accident, which closed two of the highway's three lanes in each direction near Exit 9 for more than nine hours.
Weather forecaster Roger Hill in Worcester, Vermont, says the El Nino effect remains strong across the Northeast. "And it's probably maxed out at this point and is in the process of very slowly declining; however, its influences will be with us continuing. What is going on and what the big change is here is that we've finally seen a northern branch of the jet stream start to pull down arctic air. The arctic air has been held up near the North Pole because the polar vortex has been so strong."
The precipitation came from the same low-pressure storm system that launched deadly tornadoes and drenched the nation's Southwest and Midwest. Hill says that votex is weakening, and by spring, nature, he expects, will normalize. "Nature tries to balance. That's what it's all about. It's an equilibrium level, and when one thing gets a little bit too far in one direction, there is a lot of pressure to try to flip it back toward the center line, if you will. After all, weather is just a lot of extremes trying to be balanced out in the atmosphere."
Acdording to the National Weather Service, 1 to 4 inches of a snowy mix fell from the Albany area northwest to the Mohawk Valley and north to the southern Adirondacks, and some areas could see 4 to 8 inches by the time the system moves away from the region.
