Winter Storm Hits the Pocono Mountains

It's not yet noon and yet the online edition of our local newspaper is already telling tales of woe about the series of storms hitting the Northeast with a combination of sleet and wind-driven snow. No one's ever claimed that the Pocono Record is a first-rate newspaper but it does a fair job of local traffic and weather coverage. Pocono Record photographers will go through hell and frozen high water to get a picture of a jack-knifed tractor trailer ending up in someone's yard. While most everyone disputes the reputation of the paper in other areas of coverage, everyone agrees that Pocono Record expertise is unimpeachable when reporting traffic and weather. Here's a sample:

"Cars are spinning out, flipping over and sliding off the roads. We're hearing it unfold minute by minute as we listen to the police scanner. Trucks are stuck all over the place and blocking roads. Sleet is mixing in with the snow in Stroudsburg. We can hear it pinging against the window."

Could Jack London have said it better? Could Jack London have matched the drama of listening to a police scanner when he wrote Call of the Wild?

The nearby Pocono Mountains forms a little catch-basin for weather systems moving in from the central states. Storms of all types seems to linger here for a while before bumping over the mountains in a Northeastward direction toward upstate New York and the New England states. More like a corridor than a mountain chain, our local mountains are little more than 3,000 feet at their highest, just high enough to trap cold air and storms on one side, and to form a barrier against warmer weather from the South. We're on the drip line, so to speak. Where it may rain just ten miles to the south of us, enough cold air remains trapped in Pocono Mountain limbo to frequently provide us with a delightful coating of ice. We're neither Corn Belt nor Bible Belt. In Northeastern Pennsylvania, it's strictly Ice Belt.