Thousands of Vermonters awoke Tuesday to a winter wonderland — in the middle of spring.
In addition to leaving some northern swaths of the state without power and causing road closures from Thetford to Williston, the late-season Nor’easter broke a record set in 1969 for the amount of precipitation recorded on this day at the Burlington International Airport.
The 1.1 inches the airport received on Tuesday is higher than the previous record of 0.76 inches on this date in 1969, according to Matthew Clay, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Burlington.
Other measuring stations were still reporting results, but he expected records could be set in other areas, as well.
Although it’s April showers — and not April snowstorms — that are supposed to bring May flowers, Clay noted that snow is unusual but not rare in Vermont in April.
By this point in the season, significant snow events “are generally confined to the mid- to upper-mountain locations, not really so much at sea level. So to see these kinds of accumulations is rather unusual for this time of year,” Clay said.
While the Northeast Kingdom and southern portions of the state saw barely any snowfall, the National Weather Service has been “seeing a lot of (reports of) two to six inches, with the main focus being for a portion of the Northern Champlain Valley and some of the higher summits (of) the Green Mountains,” Clay said.
Outside of Vermont, some parts of upstate New York received between 8-15 inches of snow.
In Vermont, power outages were mainly clustered in the northern part of the state, with hundreds continuing to report outages Tuesday afternoon.
Some 23,100 customers of the Vermont Electric Cooperative experienced a power outage “due to heavy wet snow event affecting the Northeast region,” it said in a press release. Its outage center reported 6,000 customers without power early Tuesday evening.
More than 110 “separate VEC outage events” were reported, it said.
Green Mountain Power reported that over 15,000 customers had lost power but then had it restored, though the utility was still responding to more than 600 customers without power early Tuesday evening, according to its outage center.
On the roadways, Vermont State Police experienced “a particularly busy morning across many VSP barracks, except in the far southern portions of the state, in places where the precipitation stayed mostly rain,” state police spokesperson Adam Silverman said.
“The heavy, wet snow created treacherous road conditions, and there were numerous vehicles off the road, trees and power lines down, and a good number of corresponding road closures,” Silverman said, adding that he was at the time unaware of any reports of serious crashes or injuries due to the snow.
Road closures were reported along Route 132 in Thetford and Route 100 in Duxbury between Miller Pond Rd and Tucker Hill Road, according to Green Mountain Power.
The Agency of Transportation also responded to five full road closures on Tuesday caused by downed trees and wires, as well as vehicle crashes, according to Ryan Knapp, the agency’s Transportation Management Center supervisor.
“This is not indicative of the number of calls we got related to single-lane blockages involving trees/wires,” he said.
Clay, the meteorologist, said Vermonters shouldn’t expect to see more snow for the rest of the week. Instead, the state will experience a “warming trend for the remainder of the week today looking at highs (in) the 40s on Wednesday and then 50s on Thursday and Friday,” he said.
