Today Marks 25th Anniversary of Earliest Snow on Record

We're off to another mild and humid morning with patchy dense fog. Temperatures were well into the 60s before daybreak and will reach the lower 70s this afternoon before a cold front arrives later today. However, it was quite a different story 25 years ago today. The earliest snow on record fell across the Northeast, delivering up to a foot of snow in parts of Vermont and even a half-inch along the Connecticut shoreline at Sikorsky Memorial Airport in Stratford.

The storm knocked out power to more than 300,000 homes. Remember, many trees still had their leaves at this time of the year, which was a major contributing factor to the number of fallen trees and limbs, many of which took down power lines. The snow-to-liquid ratio was 3.5 to 1. The hardest hit areas were Dutchess, Ulster, and Columbia counties in New York, where power was out for as much as two weeks. Albany, Columbia, Rensselaer, Dutchess, Greene, and Montgomery counties were declared disaster areas. Take a look at the satellite image from October 4, 1987, at 11 a.m.

The storm was caused by a collision of cold and wet air masses. Coastal areas of Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey were lashed by a cold rain, which eventually turned to snow, but were spared heavy snowfall as temperatures held in the 40s. The National Weather Service reported snow accumulations of up to 20 inches in upstate New York, 18 inches in Western Massachusetts, 12 inches in parts of Vermont, and nine inches in upstate Connecticut. Even the Northwest corner of New Jersey reported three inches of snow.

According to a New York Times article, "For thousands of people, it was a day to go nowhere and to do nothing, a day without power, heat, or television, or visitors, with time to look out the window at the tapestries of falling snow and silent woodlands." Connecticut had 77,000 homes without power as utility crews labored throughout the day. Snow removal efforts were handicapped because trucks had not yet been fitted with plows, and eventual melting was expected to do the job.

At least two deaths were attributed to the storm. The victims were killed by falling trees. Scores of minor traffic accidents were reported across the region, and Metro North trains were stranded for as much as two hours on some routes. The snow began late Saturday night, October 3, in some areas, and moved East where it continued throughout Sunday morning, October 4. The precipitation eventually tapered off by early-to-mid afternoon.

Paul