BALTIMORE, Maryland January 23, 2016 -Although the storm churning up the East Coast is dumping two and three feet of snow across much of the Atlantic Seaboard, flooding the coastlines with ice-choked tidal surges, collapsing the roof of a high school gymnasium and a Harford County, Maryland, grocery store, and convincing the Mayor of Baltimore to Order all non-emergency vehicles off of City streets by early evening, meteorologists have stopped short of calling the weather event a "blizzard." That is because the winds associated with the storm, while strong, have generally fallen short of the minimum speed for a storm to advance into the category of a blizzard.
Winds must either reach sustained speeds of 35 miles per hour, or have regular gusts of at least 35 miles per hour, for a storm system to reach into the blizzard category. Amazingly enough, a storm can really have just a small amount of snow associated with it and still be called a blizzard if the winds are strong enough. The winds associated with the present storm have stalled in the mid-twenty miles per hour range, with 26 miles per hour being about an average speed of winds spinning out of this storm, so far. We say, "so far," because there is a new development that weather watchers are warning folk about: the storm is still strong, but instead of moving along with its swirling winds -as typical 'Noreasters' do - it has stalled at a place off the coast of Ocean City, Maryland, where it continues to dump lots of snow onto the Baltimore area.
Meteorologists have generally agreed that the winds will not get a whole lot stronger than they currently are.
Along the Delmarva Coast, the biggest concern was flooding. The Mayor of Lewes Delaware, which sits at the point where the Delaware Bay joins the Atlantic Ocean, the high tide was the second highest on record according to a report in the Delaware News Journal.
Said the newspaper and its reporter, Molly Murray:
"Lewes Mayor Ted Becker said at 5:30 a.m. he went to check on the Inn at Canal Square along the Lewes & Rehoboth Canal.
"The canal was in its banks," he said.
A little more than an hour later, it was within 10 feet of the hotel doors, he said. The water never reached the hotel.
The worst of the coastal impacts from the storm was expected to be from Lewes north to New Jersey.
Del. 1 from Dewey Beach south was closed and the ocean breached the dune at three locations about a mile north of Indian River Inlet Bridge, which was closed in both directions.
At the new Inlet Bridge, the dune reconstruction and reinforcement installed after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, held.
Just south of Dewey, at Indian Beach, ocean waves rolled up the Beach Street dune crossing, down the street and sent a slurry of sea foam and water onto the ocean highway."
Meanwhile, the Mayor of Baltimore City has just announced (i.e., at 5:50 pm on Saturday, January 23, 2016) that the so-called "Phase 3" of the Baltimore City Snow Emergency Plan will go into effect at 6:30 pm. Phase 3 is, in effect, a lock-down of the entire City. The only vehicles permitted to be on City streets, beginning at 6:30 pm, are police, fire (including ambulances), snow plows and related public works vehicles, and BGE emergency response vehicles. No other vehicles are permitted to be on the streets. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said the Phase 3 plan will remain in effect until Sunday morning at 6:30 am. In other words, we are talking about a 12 hour lock-down. Mayor Rawlings-Blake did say that there would be a re-evaluation of the need for Phase 3 as the current time period for Phase 3 staying in effct approaches. If necessary, it could be extended, she said.
City officials said the decision to go to Phase 3 was based on the increasing amounts of time that City workers were spending digging stranded drivers out. When time is spent on digging individuals out, it takes away from the time those city workers have to clear the roads. With Phase 3 in effect, nothing will divert the efforts of the workers the City has available for clearing the roads.
At 6:12 pm, snow accumulations were within just one to three inches of earning the title of the largest snow storm in the recorded history of the Baltimore area.
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