Published by Highlands Today, by Gary Pinnell
SEBRING – In Washington, a Smithsonian storage building collapsed under 10 inches of snow. In New York City, school was canceled for 1.1 million students.
Snowplows have been rolling around the clock for days in New England and the Midwest. Philadelphia and Baltimore are buried under 3 feet of snow.
And in Sebring, Florida?
It was 50 degrees and sunny just before lunch in the new golf clubhouse restaurant at Sun ‘n Lake, where Diane Reidy canceled her golf date.
“It was too windy,” she explained. That explanation fell a little flat, so she just fessed up.
“I’m a wimp,” said Reidy, who’s here from Windsor, Ontario, Canada.
Blue Northern
She had just gotten off the phone with her daughter, Cindy. It had been snowing for 24 hours, and now the wind was picking up, so those drifts were going to pile up. Reidy’s son, Darrel, a home inspector, was still 45 minutes from home.
“Hopefully, he’ll get home safely,” Reidy said. Quite a contrast, she realized.
Snow, wind and slush hounded eastern commuters Wednesday as blizzard warnings from Baltimore to New York City heralded the second major storm in a region already blanketed by historic weekend snowfalls, the Associated Press reported.
This may be a 100-year winter storm. “It’s hard to find anything in the history books of these types of storms back-to-back,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Stephen Konarik.
More than 10 inches of new snow fell before dawn in parts of Maryland that had received up to 30 inches just a few days earlier. Plows and salt spreaders fought heavy snow in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where the flakes briefly turned to rain for a slushy mix.
In the snowbound national capital, the wind was gusting from 25 to 45 mph. Driving conditions got so bad, even snowplows pulled off the road.
“It’s embarrassing that the world’s largest superpower closes from a few feet of snow,” said Alex Krause, 23, of Los Angeles, who was stranded in Washington and visiting the National Mall. “The Kremlin must be laughing.”
Back to Sebring
In the Sun ‘n Lake parking lot, there were five vehicles from Ontario and Illinois, three from Michigan, and others from Tennessee, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Florida tags barely outnumbered out-of-staters.
After a few minutes, Reidy was joined for lunch by a friend, Mary Coe. Seventy-five percent of the 100 women in their golf league canceled Wednesday, Coe reported. Coe, who’s here seven months out of the year, is from lower Michigan, where the temperature was in the mid-20s and a severe weather alert was in effect.
Still, the weather here is only 30 degrees warmer. Are they still glad they came for the winter?
“Oh, absolutely,” Reidy said. “This is just a blip. It’s bound to happen.”
Both women own houses in Highlands County, so the expenses would be the same whether they stayed in the Great White North or the Warm Comfortable South.
“Besides,” Coe pointed out, “I have friends here.”
“What would we do if we were up there?” Reidy asked. “Play in the snow?”