Snow: The power worrries

The gentle snow continues, and driving around, the roads even north and west of the city were mostly wet. Meanwhile, a postcard-worthy accumulation was building on the trees, and this could spell trouble later. Regardless of the final snow totals, this is looking like the longest-lasting and windiest storm of an insane season.

With temperatures near or a tad above freezing, the flakes have a high water content, meaning they are quite heavy. The snow is having trouble sticking on blacktop, which has been well warmed by the Feburary sun, and even though it won't be more than a rumor today, the sun is having an effect behind the clouds.

Those tree branches, though, are higher up where it's cooler, and they don't have the blacktop's capacity to store solar heat . That wet snow bonds to the branches like super glue, and they may well be deeply burdened when the howling winds kick up tonight.

Gusts could reach 50 m.p.h. once the storm peaks, and we could see a repeat of the mass outages that occurred two weeks ago. When the winds kicked up that afternoon, try as they might, they could not shake the wet snow off the trees, and branches came crashing down.

PECO reported 225,000 outages, places it at No. 9 on the all-time outage list. The reigning outage champ is the Jan. 7, 1994, ice storm, with 549,100. Hurricane Isabel is the silver medalist with 517,343 on Sept. 18, 2003.

So far, about 1 to 2 inches has fallen atop old snow, grass and metal surfaces west of the city, and the National Weather Service is staying with its call for a foot or more north and west, up to a foot in the city, and a little less to the south and east.

The final accumulation totals remain in doubt, and don't be surprised by tweaks or revisions. This is a wild and complicated storm, forecast to track up the coast, jog west near New York and then spin in place.

Snow of varying intensity could continue into tomorrow morning, with snow showers then possible into Saturday.

The great blizzard of 1888 took a similarly bizarre path, but Tony Gigi, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service, says this one also evokes memories of March 2001.

A storm was forecast to leave cosmic amounts of snow on Philadelphia. It did leave cosmic snows -- but in upstate New York. Around here, it deposited about an inch of semi-white crud.

Gigi said said that areas to the north of a certain line are likely to get more than forecast, and to the south, significantly less. That line, he says, is running perilously close to Philadelphia.

Stay tuned.