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Tuesday, January 26, 2016

2016 Blizzard in Pennsylvania #Jonas

2016 Blizzard in Pennsylvania #Jonas
Last week all of our local meteorologist's were coming on TV and warning all central Pennsylvania residents to get ready for a big snowstorm coming our way the following week. When we hear these reports a week out...we don't get too excited about it because the weatherman has been wrong before.

However, starting on Tuesday January 19th, 2016 we all started to pay more attention. As #Jonas was making his way closer to us, their weather forecasts were becoming more accurate and as each day passed, those predicted snow totals went up. Sigh. A big old 2016 blizzard was heading our way.
2016 Blizzard in Pennsylvania #Jonas

On Wednesday evening we headed out to the grocery store to stock up on the essentials that we would need for about a week. We also headed to Lowe's to get a new snow shovel, rock salt and a few other snow removal tools. Our final trip was to the gas station to get gas for the snow blower and a propane tank for our gas grill. After all, if they power went out, we wanted to be able to cook food on our grill.

Friday afternoon around 3:00 PM we started to see the snow flurries here in the Harrisburg and Hershey area. As the evening went along, the snow picked up. It was breezy overnight but not what I would call windy. Overall, it was a peaceful night and by the time we got up in the morning, we had about 6-7" of snow.
2016 Blizzard in Pennsylvania #Jonas

As Saturday, January 23rd, 2016 rolled along, the heavy snow bands moved in. At times we were getting 2-3" of snow an hour. As the snow increased, the winds did too. Holy guacamole, at times it was really windy out there with a few wind gusts of over 25 mph. Thankfully though, we didn't have over 35 mph sustained blizzard winds for hours, like those in Philly, Baltimore and DC.

Along with the winds...came the snow drifts! I would say that it was shortly after lunchtime on Saturday that those winds really started to kick in! At one point in the day, we couldn't open our front or back doors due to all of the snow drifts and we couldn't see our car or mailboxes outside either. The snowdrifts had completely buried them!
2016 Blizzard in Pennsylvania #Jonas

By the time it was all said and done...on Sunday morning we measured a whopping 31" of snow in our backyard. One of our big snow drift areas in our yard measured 39" of snow. Oh my gosh...a dog or small child could go out there and get lost. YUCK!

I'm thankful that Jonas and the 2016Blizzard are done and hopefully we don't see anymore winter storms like this one for a long time! I've included a few original blizzard photos for you to enjoy in this blog post. Goodbye Jonas!

1 comment:

jopb said...

As I already said on the TCC site we. Too had a lot of snow on Long Island. I was more worried about the winds which gusted up to 50 MPH. However, since we did not lose power and now the days are warmer I feel lucky that everything is over and not much damage was done.