The South Fork was spared widespread power outages and flooding over the weekend as Long Island’s first official blizzard since 2018 dropped nearly two feet of drifting snow in some parts of the region.
Roads and sidewalks were treacherous — and in some places remained that way for a couple of days poststorm — but people “heeded the advice to stay in and stay off the roads,” East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said yesterday.
Along with his counterparts in Sag Harbor and East Hampton Villages and Southampton Town, Mr. Van Scoyoc declared a state of emergency on Friday night.
The town employed some 50 plow drivers, ranging from its 12 full-time employees to private contractors, who worked almost 24 hours straight starting that night. “It was harder than I thought because of the wind,” said Stephen Lynch, the town’s highway superintendent. “As we were plowing roads, an hour later it didn’t even look like it because the wind was blowing so hard.”
His team worked with first responders to make sure roads were cleared in case of emergency. “They would call us with any ambulance calls that they had, so we would go ahead of them with a plow, which worked out well,” Mr. Lynch said.
Mr. Van Scoyoc said he’d been concerned about coastal erosion, but that largely did not come to pass. “This storm had a lot of high winds, but it didn’t really align with the tide cycle, and moved through relatively quickly,” he said.
On Saturday afternoon, Coast Guard Long Island Sound sector reported waves cresting at 15 feet some 20 miles off the coast of Montauk. Henry Uihlein, who owns a marina in Montauk and lives in Amagansett, said the marina’s floating docks were swaying higher than usual. The wind, blowing at least 40 miles per hour for most of the storm, worried him because he has 217 boats in winter storage, some stacked on racks as tall as 30 feet.
“It was different from other storms. We’ve had more wind and more snow, but not a combination like that,” Mr. Uihlein said. “It turned out to be okay. I don’t know of anyone losing boats or boats falling over. We got lucky. Funny enough, I got my own truck stuck.”
After falling all night Friday and almost all of Saturday, snow petered off around 7 p.m. The storm headed up the East Coast toward Maine, but not before dropping a record-tying two feet in Boston. An official snow total for East Hampton was 16.1 inches, but higher drifts were widely observed.
Craig Berkoski of Sag Harbor spent several hours shoveling snow for Anchor Homes and Estates, the property care business he works for. His snowboots-on-the-ground report was that “It’s hard work, obviously, a lot of heavy lifting. At the end of the day, I think everybody that is doing this sort of work is exhausted, but you do have a sense that you did something positive and you helped out the community.”
He took advantage of his own sloping backyard to build a small luge for his daughter and a friend. “It didn’t start intentionally as a luge, but as I was clearing the snow off my driveway, I saw it forming in my head, and it ended up being a lot of fun and pretty cool . . . I think the girls would have stayed out there all night. It was nice to see them play like this.”
Mr. Berkoski’s boss, Keith Schumann, said his small crew was “compensated well” for the eight to 10 hours they all spent on what was technically a day off. “It was interesting to see how everyone was dealing with the displacement of the snow, because normally you can pile stuff up on either sides of driveways, but with two feet of snow, you’re seeing giant snowbanks in the middle of town, literally in the middle of the street. We drove by a guy in a Rapid Recovery vehicle that had a truck with a snowplow on it. If that tells you anything, even the snowplow guys were fighting through it pretty hard.”
For Mr. Schumann, digging out safely has personal significance. His grandfather died of a heart attack in 1995 while shoveling snow. “I always stop and help if I see an older person shoveling themselves out,” he said. “I know how strenuous it is.”
This blizzard did prove deadly. In Uniondale, a snowplow driver discovered an elderly woman dead in her car in a hotel parking lot, with at least one of the car windows down. In Cutchogue, an elderly man fell into his pool and died while shoveling snow.
In Sag Harbor, Dee Yardley, the highway superintendent, said Tuesday that the “main roads are in pretty good shape, but some side roads still have hard pack, and that’s not going anywhere. We put salt brine out the day before the storm. That does work up to so many inches, and it actually worked pretty good for half the storm.”
The only big problem, he said, “was cars being parked on the road. There’s a dozen cars that are all snowbanked in.” Village Code mandates vehicles need to be parked elsewhere during snowstorms, but “a lot of these people pay the $75 fine and park there anyway.”
East Hampton Fire Department Chief Gerard Turza Jr. said all of the local departments received calls for carbon monoxide and gas alarms, caused by blocked heating and dryer vents. “We’d like to remind the public to clear snow from these vents to avoid a buildup of deadly carbon monoxide and gas in their houses,” he said.
People should also be cautious when going ice skating or fishing, said Mr. Turza, because conditions “can be very deceiving.” He reminded everyone to dig out fire hydrants near their houses. “Hydrants covered in snow can be a big problem for us.”
Most schools were closed Monday, or had delayed openings or remote learning. One East Hampton High School basketball contest, a boys varsity game at Amityville High School, did go forward on Monday afternoon.
Adam Fine, superintendent of the East Hampton School District, sent out a call for help clearing the paths, and along with school employees, a number of community members, including some alumni, answered the call. It was the only reason the district was able to open on Tuesday, Mr. Fine said during Tuesday’s school board meeting. “Who would have known that snow would be more challenging than Covid?”
Bill Evans, a meteorologist who owns the Sag Harbor WLNG radio station with his wife, Sandra Foschi, said Tuesday that people in the region can now expect to see a pattern of snowfall, then rain and thawing, a freeze-over, and then more snow several days later. Indeed, both he and the National Weather Service are forecasting another cold blast bringing a wintry mix of snow and rain for tonight into tomorrow.
“It does work in cycles,” Mr. Evans said. “It looks like we’ll continue to see that through the end of February and beginning of March.”
