Philly Snow, sleet: Clean-up issues far heavier than you might think
An estimated 60 trillion pounds of snow, ice, and rain fell on Philly.
Just judging from the water content of the snow and ice that fell atop the region this week, had it been all snow we would have been shoveling 15 to 20 inches.
As it was, the totals generally were less than half that amount.
But in terms of removal, the snow-ice-rain mixture was substantially more problematical that it would have been is this had been just plain snow.
Most of the measureable "snow" actually was sleet, which counts as snow in the records.
Sleet forms when snow melts passing through a warm layer of air and then re-freezes as it re-enters colder air. This happens often.
What doesn't happen often is sleet becoming the main event of a storm, something not exactly forecast.
No records are kept separately for sleet accumulation, but we would suspect this rivals what fell in the Blizzard of 1993, and in the sleet storms of 2007.
In the end, by our rough estimate, a total of 60 trillions pounds of snow, sleet, and rain descended upon Philadelphia.
That's based on the fact that an inch of water over 1 square foot weighs 5.2 pounds. The city is about 142 square miles in area, which translates to about 40 trillion square feet, and the storm's total precipitation was roughly 1.8 inches.
This stuff rather quickly mutated into something resembling concrete, and walking in some places is not unlike the sensation of wearing platform shoes.