Rescuers used an inflatable toy sled to transport heart attack victim on snow-clogged Baltimore street. (Photo by Sean Bowie)

by FERN SHEN, photos by SEAN BOWIE

One dire consequence of Baltimore’s snow-smothered streets was apparent on Saturday, when rescuers couldn’t reach a Hampden man who’d had an apparent heart-attack while shoveling snow. They had to drag him out of his neighborhood on a child’s inflatable sled because Ash Street, where he lived, is unplowed.

Baltimore photographer Sean Bowie happened upon the scene at about 3:30 pm. Later Saturday, at about sundown, he encountered a city snow-plow on Auchenteroly Terrace near Druid Hill Park that had been sitting idle for, as best he could tell, nearly 18 hours waiting for two flats tires to be repaired.

“I couldn’t help wondering about the connections, on some level, between these two things I had just seen,” Bowie said, in a telephone interview today.

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On Kirk Avenue, tons to shovel, but at least it was sunny.

story and photos by FERN SHEN

On a sunny Sunday, Baltimore shoveled out from under one storm and braced for the next one. Another five inches of snow is going to fall on Tuesday afternoon, the National Weather Service says.

Meanwhile, the city is still not entirely ready for prime time. A brief sampling of some north Baltimore neighborhoods suggests it’s not just side streets that are a mess. Major north-south arteries like Calvert Street were extremely clogged Sunday with chunky bits of snow and parked, snow-covered cars. Only a single lane, at best, was passable on Calvert.

The Jones-Falls Expressway (I-83) is  in good shape –the trick is getting to it.

As for mass transit Monday morning, the picture is bleak . The MTA website Sunday night said it all:

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Tree blocking 40th Street this morning. (Photo by Fern Shen)

For once, a monster snow storm lived up to the hype: this blizzard broke the all-time record, smothering Baltimore with two to three feet of snow that continued to fall throughout the day.

Pictured above is one of many trees down across the city, blocking roads and contributing to the huge number of people without electricity today — 151,000, according to some reports.

Digging out on University Parkway. Heavy snow, slow going.

Mayor Stephanie-Rawlings-Blake was busy with a bona-fide crisis on her first two days on the job. Here’s one of numerous photos from her office sent to the media today and an excerpt from the accompanying text.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake thanking road crews aft. (Photo: courtesy Mayor's office.)

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced the activities of the city’s Snow Team during this weekend’s blizzard. As of 10:00 a.m. this morning, anywhere from 22 to 25 inches of snow have fallen on the city, and forecasters expect another 3 to 6 inches to fall this afternoon.

Thanks to their coordinated effort, the Police and Fire Department responded to every call for service.

Video Americain on Friday morning was jammed. (Photo by Fern Shen)

Toilet paper wasn’t the only thing Roland Parkers stocked up on Friday, as the storm approached. The Cold Spring Lane branch of Video Americain was, uncharacteristically, packed.

Since the advent of Netflicks, video-on-demand, Hulu, etc, our favorite musty House of Film has been struggling. Maybe this unsually snowy winter will help them hang in a bit longer?

Many Baltimoreans learned a new word last night — “thundersnow.”

It sounds like a Pokemon’s superpower (Your guy has Shock-wave? Mine has Thundersnow!) It’s also the name of a heavy metal band in Rochester. But meteorologically speaking, it is actually a rare and powerful weather phenomenon.

We experienced it as a muffled 3 a.m. BOOM, a flash of light outside and an apparent surge of energy through our house’s electrical system that set off a security alarm and made the lights flicker. Earlier in the evening, what we later deduced to be another thunder snow phenomenon knocked out the television and burned out a surge protector.

Christine Dell’Amore, writing in National Geographic News describes thundersnow this way:

The sun heats the ground and pushes masses of warm, moist air upward, creating unstable air columns.
As it rises, the moisture condenses to form clouds, which are jostled by internal turbulence.
The “tricky part” for making thundersnow, (Patrick ) Market said, is creating that atmospheric instability in the wintertime.
For thundersnow to occur, the air layer closer to the ground has to be warmer than the layers above, but still cold enough to create snow—a very precise circumstance.

How thundersnow forms, from Wikipedia.

- by Fern Shen