4th nor’easter to hit Connecticut starts off less severe than anticipated

March 22--The winter's fourth nor'easter in as many weeks had many Connecticut residents asking, "Is that all there is?"

The storm, which had been forecast to drop between six inches and a foot of snow across much of Connecticut, didn't really begin in earnest until after the start of the evening rush hour. And in some places, as darkness fell, snow wasn't even sticking to the ground.

But emergency management and public works officials in communities around the New Haven area were determined not to let down their guard, insisting that the worst was yet to come.

The National Weather Service has a winter storm warning through 6 a.m. Thursday. NBC Connecticut Chief Meteorologist Ryan Hanrahan said Wednesday evening that the station's weather team, which had been predicting 6 to 12 inches in the run-up to the storm, had revised its estimates for the New Haven area to 3 to 6 inches.

Richard Fontana, New Haven's deputy director of emergency operations, told the city's department heads, late Wednesday afternoon that he was still expecting between 3 and 7 inches of snow to fall before midnight, with another 4 to 8 inches expected to fall by Thursday morning.

"We can not fall asleep at the wheel," Fontana said. "That's not how we do business."

New Haven officials had 55 plows at their disposal to clear the city's streets, Fontana said. Independent contractors were part of that total and weren't brought to work until after 4 p.m. in an effort to avoid piling up overtime, he said.

"We haven't gone beyond out budget yet, but we're right up against it," Fontana said.

The town of Cheshire had already gone well beyond the amount of money it had budget for snow removal and road treatments this winter before the storm even started. George Noewatne, the town's director of public works, said Cheshire officials had budgeted $335,000 for snow removal for the winter and were about $160,000 over that amount headed into Wednesday's storm.

"The longer the storm takes to arrive, the harder it makes it for us to plan," Noewatne said. "You obviously want to pre-treat the roads before the storm arrives. But at the same time, you don't want to use too much of the stuff too soon."

Cheshire's public works department had 14 dump trucks with plows and five or six pick up tricks equipped for plowing during the storm.

Connecticut's Department of Transportation had 634 plow trucks and 200 private contractors at its disposal for the storm. The agency has roughly 50 satellite facilities throughout the state.

DOT also had 17 industrial/loader-mounted snowblowers, each capable of moving 1,500 tons of snow per hour, according to a statement released by agency.

Connecticut's two major utilities also took the storm equally seriously. Both the United Illuminating Co. and Eversource Energy treated the nor'easter as a Class 5 storm.

For Orange-based UI, that meant that utility officials were expecting between 5,000 and 10,000 customer outages across the company's 17-town service territory in New Haven, Bridgeport and surrounding. Mitch Gross, an Eversource spokesman, said based on that classification, the utility projects that as many as 10 percent of its 1.2 million customers are expected to have lost power at some point during the storm.

The amount of wind that came with the storm is likely to have an impact on power outage levels. Fontana said New Haven officials were expecting sustained winds of up to 25 mph with gusts of up to 35 mph.

Even though the storm was slow in getting started, it had a significant impact on activity levels at Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks. Alisa Sisic, a spokeswoman for the Connecticut Airport Authority, said that as of 4 p.m. 40 percent of the arrivals and departures from Bradley had been canceled.

Tweed New Haven Regional Airport remained open Wednesday for general aviation flights, although all of its American Eagle commercial flights to and from Philadelphia were canceled for Wednesday and early Thursday.

"As of now, we do have snow coming down, but it's not of much intensity and it's not really sticking to the ground. So we're open," said Tweed Assistant Manager Felipe Suriel late Wednesday afternoon.

But American "canceled a lot of the flights due to the weather in Philly" and as of late Wednesday afternoon, the first commercial flight in was expected to be the one from Philadelphia that lands at 11:54 a.m. Thursday, Suriel said.

The first flight out from Tweed is scheduled to take off at 1:06 p.m. Thursday.

Many school systems across the New Haven area hedged their bets, electing to use a combination of delayed openings and early dismissals rather than using another snow day that would have to be made up before the end of the school year.

Even though many Connecticut residents have expressed frustration over a snow storm forecast for the second day of spring, some people were taking the day in stride.

There was no pre-storm rush at the Woodbridge True Value hardware store. Chris Scandone, the assistant manager, said people seemed to have their fill of winter, or at least didn't want to buy a new shovel in March.

Bags of potting soil and compost sat outside the store next to snowblowers. Shovels and seeds for spring gardens shared space inside, where metal rakes had sold out.

"We're kind of hoping for spring," Scandone said. "If all the storms happened last month, we would have sold a ton of stuff."

The unpredictable weather during this change of created a good deal of uncertainty in how best to stock the shelves, he said.

"What do you do about it? Do you bring out the spring stuff?" he said " It's spring, right?"

Reports from Register staff members were added to this story.

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