I forget what year it was, sometimes in the 90’s (96?) right after New Year’s, I was living in Baltimore and we got a really bad cold snap that lasted for well over a week. It’s not unusual here in the Mid Atlantic to get cold snaps but not typically one lasting for that long. The day time temperatures were only around 1 to 5 degrees and at night it was in the below double digits. It was so cold that you had to shield your eyes lest the water in your eyeballs froze and if you breathed through your nose, it hurt.
I remember it was so unusually cold and for longer than usual that the power grid was having problems and there were rolling brown outs and black outs. I remember having a black out at work and going home early and while driving on the Baltimore beltway, saw big rig after big rig pulled over on the side of the highway, evidently their diesel fuel was freezing.
It warmed up a bit, but still only high temps in the low 30’s mid 20’s but then came the ice storms. Week after week of sleet and freezing rain like clockwork every Wednesday or Thursday for the next 6 weeks.
The ice was so thick on my street, a one-way street that rarely saw a snow plow or salt truck, that it resembled a bob sled run and there were ruts in the ice from cars driving over that it was like jumping a curb to park in front of my house. The Baltimore Beltway and other road got chewed up so bad from all the ice that I took until the following fall until they’d all been fixed.
After about the 4th ice storm, I told my husband that we needed to move to someplace like Florida because I was becoming suicidal or homicidal or possibly both.
But typical of the weather around these parts, we skipped over spring and went straight into summer, a brutally hot summer. But hot I can take, the cold, not so much.
