Powerful Winter Storms Blow Through Area

By Kevin Phelan

This winter has been one of the harshest, stormiest seasons in recent memory. Strong gusts of wind, freezing temperatures, and several major snow storms have combined to make this one of the most hazardous winter seasons for Rockland County area residents in several years.

Brendan Phelan, a 20-year-old student at Rockland Community College, was one of the early victims this season of the unpredictable weather. During a powerful windstorm in late January Brendan’s car, a 2008 Subaru sedan, was damaged by a falling tree branch while it was parked outside of his house in Tappan, New York.

His passenger side rear view mirror was snapped off by the branch, left dangling by the wires inside, and paint along the hood and the side of the car was scratched off. The damages to the car came to a total of almost $400 to repair.

Brendan feels his luck was especially bad because the car was still relatively new to him; he has had it for less than a year. “Of course the tree had to hit my car and not (my brother’s)” Brendan says, “(He) probably wouldn’t have even cared about the scratches.”

On February 10 a powerful snowstorm hit the Rockland County area, dropping nearly a foot of snow in certain places. Twenty-year-old Amanda O’Connell was on the campus of her school, Saint Thomas Aquinas College, when it hit. Her classes were cancelled but she was still required to move her car from one lot to another in order to allow snow plows through.

A campus security guard was kind enough to give her a ride to her car, but it wasn’t until she got there that Amanda realized that she had nothing with her with which to dig her car out of the snow. For nearly an hour Amanda used her bare hands to remove the eight inches of snow from her car, then switched to using a CD case as an impromptu shovel when she finally could get into her car.

“I think that may have been the absolute coldest I’ve ever been in my entire life,” Amanda said of her ordeal. When Amanda did finally get back to her room she said that she was shivering for almost two full hours before she finally warmed back up.

Another snowstorm hit the area on Friday, February 26; this one even more severe than the one that had struck earlier in the month. Rich Goldberg, the liquor store manager at a Rockland area supermarket, was scheduled to come into work but after looking outside realized there was little chance of him actually making it in.

Rich lives in Monroe, New York, one of the areas most affected by the storm. By Friday morning over two feet of snow had already fallen on Rich’s driveway, and at the end facing the street was a pile of snow built by the plows which stood almost four feet tall. After shoveling for almost two hours Rich’s driveway was finally clear of the snow, but he would be out to shovel again later that night and once again the following morning.

While a fresh snowfall may bring with it a sense of tranquil beauty, it also brings with it the need to be careful when dealing with this hazardous weather.