Moving Words – A Cold Presidents’ Day
Timothy Brady
“Winter forms our character and brings out our best.” – Tim Allen
With all the unprecedented unknowns and challenges we as an industry are facing during this on-going pandemic and the upcoming election, not to mention the heat waves over the past couple of months, it’s time for us to cool off. So I’ve pulled out of my archives of ‘moving experiences,’ a Cold February story of snow. Lots of snow.
Being a mover has many challenges… this is one of them. The middle of February, 2003, had a ‘weather event’ on the East Coast that became known as the Presidents’ Day Storm. The storm lasted from February 14 – 19, 2003. It spread heavy snow across the major cities of the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, making it the defining snowstorm of the very snowy winter of 2002-2003. Cities from Washington, D.C. to Boston were covered in 15–30 inches of snow, with Baltimore and Boston the two cities hit the hardest.
We were making deliveries from D.C. to Northeastern Massachusetts around the 12th of February, 2003. I’d been watching the Weather Channel and tracking the jet streams like I do every winter I’m on the road. The jet streams are your best gauge of where the most severe weather will occur, as they’re the wind currents that move major weather events. Through my own and meteorologists’ observations up and down the East Coast, we had a series of unusual weather systems combining to create ‘a perfect storm.’ But like any developing weather, there were multiple possibilities depending on when and where the weather systems converged.
The first catalyst for the creation of this weather event was an extreme low pressure system off the coast of the Carolinas. This allowed the system to feed off the moisture of the Atlantic Ocean and increased precipitation totals from North Carolina to Massachusetts. Next, a high pressure system was in place over eastern portions of Canada, allowing cold air to be brought down into the coastal areas. This extremely cold air collided with the warmer, moist air coming up from off the Carolina Coast, which turned precipitation into an all-snow event rather than a mix of rain, freezing rain, sleet and snow.
As we continued up the coast from New Jersey, these weather patterns began to be more organized with Canada’s cold air converging with the warm moist air moving up the coast from the Carolinas. We delivered in Upstate New York, Connecticut, and several places in and around the Boston area. We even ventured into Putney, Vermont, to pick up a load to bring back to our warehouse in Sutton, Massachusetts. We were headed back from Vermont to the warehouse about noon on February 16th when the snow started coming down in earnest. By the time we reached Sutton and backed to the dock to unload the Vermont shipment at around 1pm, we already had six inches of snow on the ground. The warehouse crew off-loaded the shipment in about an hour – we were now at about nine inches of snow. The warehouse crew then hightailed it home, leaving myself, my wife and our 12-lb. Siamese cat to fend for ourselves.
We hunkered down in the cab of the truck with our 30-amp shore cord plugged into the warehouse power to keep the heat and electrical appliances in the truck powered. And it continued to snow at a rate of four to five inches an hour for the rest of that day and into the next morning.
It was about 2 am when the heat in the truck went off as the electric grid in the area went down. As I recall, it was the cat who came tapping my cheek to let me know something wasn’t right. Thank the Lord for the 7.5kw diesel APU I had as a back-up to the shore power. I fired it up, and we had electricity and heat again.
It was about this time someone else came tapping – on the door. One of the warehouse personnel hadn’t been able to get his car started and had decided to hole up in the warehouse overnight. But with no electricity in the building – he had no heat. He’d seen our lights come back on, and knew someone was up, hopefully who could help. I handed him a super long extension cord that he stretched under one of the overhead doors into the small shipping office and plugged in a space heater.
We all then hunkered down again and let it snow.
And snow.
And snow.
It snowed off and on for the next day and a half, finally stopping sometime in the afternoon of February 18th. While the majority of the area received around 30 inches of snow, Sutton, being at a slightly higher elevation, got nearly 4 feet of the white stuff. We were snowed in.
For the next three days, all we could do was sit and wait for the power crews to reestablish the electricity for the building and for a plow crew with a front-end loader to come and dig us out. We were very fortunate to be on the south side of a large building, with plenty of food in the truck and full fuel tanks allowing us to just sit and wait.
I did spend some time each day clearing snow from on top of and around the truck, so we could get in and out of the building to use the restroom and take food to the warehouse man stranded with us.
Sometime during the afternoon of the 20th, we saw our first people other than the warehouse man – a snowplow operator, followed by a state trooper checking to see how we were doing. It was that afternoon that the electricity finally came back on.
All and all, we were snowed in for nearly five days. Again, we were extremely fortunate to be safely parked, with provisions and fuel so it was more like a restful vacation in a far-off cabin than being stranded. It’s that trucker and scout thing – being prepared and having an APU made all the difference in the world.
We did miss all the Presidents’ Day sales, though.
