Northern Residents Lament Snowy Winter

[February 27, 2008]  CHICAGO (AP) -- Betty Stewart's Tuesday started with her stepping into a slushy puddle just long enough to get her sock wet and having her newspaper blown from her hands and getting soaked on the wet ground.

"Enough already," she said.

Like many others, the 30-year-old receptionist has had it with winter and what seems like unusually wet weather.

"Coming to work, people are mad at the world," said Olivia Young, a customer service associate in downtown Chicago. Winter, she said, "just puts you in an overwrought situation."

Experts say people in some northern states aren't just looking to complain; the weather this winter truly is worse in some ways.

In Boston, for example, 49.6 inches of snow has fallen this winter, or 19.3 inches more than normal. In Madison, Wis., where it never had snowed more than 76.6 inches, the city already had seen 77 inches by Feb. 12.

Last week, Grand Rapids, Mich., shattered its December-February snowfall record of 85.1 inches set in 1951-52. As of Tuesday afternoon, 90.4 inches had fallen. And though the month doesn't end until Friday, the city has a new February record of 37.1 inches, surpassing 1990's 35.5 inches.

On Tuesday, snow fell from Illinois to New England, with more than 6 inches on the ground by late morning in northern Indiana and Ohio. Up to 16 inches of snow was possible across northern Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, the National Weather Service said.

In Chicago, more than 50 inches has fallen since the beginning of December, which is about 15 inches above normal and makes this the first winter since 1978-79 the area has seen more than 50 inches of snow, said Amy Seeley, a weather service meteorologist.

Snowy weather and fluctuating temperatures have led to Chicago having to fill in more than 60,000 potholes since Dec. 1 -- nearly twice the number filled during the same period last year and, as any Chicago driver can tell you, a fraction of those out there.

Some communities are running low on road salt, scrambling to find more and reporting in some cases a spike in traffic accidents because roads are not sufficiently salted.

Officials at Southern Illinois University are lamenting ice, not snow, after it forced them to cancel classes three times this month.

"Snow, you can plow that right off," said school spokesman Rod Sievers. "But the ice was just brutal, brutal."

Evrod Cassimy knows exactly how brutal after spending 11 hours stranded in a traffic jam south of Madison, Wis. earlier this month when a storm dumped 12 to 19 inches of snow.

"I am fed up with it," said Cassimy, who lives in Rockford, Ill. and works in Madison. "It is just kind of one of those things if I hear there's snow, I just don't even want to believe it any more. I am definitely sick of it."

All this snowing, thawing and freezing has people slipping and falling on sidewalks or crashing their cars on streets as slippery as hockey rinks.

"We're definitely experiencing more ... people with broken arms, a lot of fall-type injuries, and car accidents," said Rockford Memorial Hospital spokesman Mike Wiltse. "Driveways and sidewalks are nothing but ice."

What makes it worse, people say, is it seems there's been no break, with storms arriving one after another.

"It's been endless," Roland Swanson said as he waited to cross a street in South Bend, Ind. "It just keeps coming. It's killing us by the inch."

[Associated Press; By DON BABWIN]

Associated Press writers James Prichard in Grand Rapids, Mich., Robert Imrie in Wausau, Wis., Tom Coyne in South Bend, Ind., and Mark Pratt in Boston contributed to this report.

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