Northeast Pennsylvania braces for a frigid Saturday, but it could be worse

Feb. 3—Howard Fisher remembers his worst winter in North Dakota when snow nearly buried the trailer he and his wife rented in Bismarck.

It was 1997. They had to remove a screen door window and shovel their way outside, where Fisher's 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme was covered and frozen to the street.

"From the sidewalk, the snow bank went up and over our trailer and down the other side," said Fisher, Ph.D., a University of Scranton communications professor who lives in Nicholson. "Honestly, I would take a 10-foot drift like that over black ice on an Abington road."

Saturday morning promises to be bone-chillingly cold, with temperatures likely to climb from near zero into the lower to mid 20s, AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Tom Kines said. Cold conditions should give way Sunday to much warmer weather in the mid to upper 40s, followed by above-average temperatures forecast next week.

Northeast Pennsylvania is actually in for a colder Saturday than Bismarck — where Kines said temperatures should span from the upper teens to lower 40s — but exceedingly cold days here have been few and far between in recent months.

The average temperature last month at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport was 35.9 degrees, making it the fourth-warmest January on record. The record warmest was 39.5 degrees in 1932.

There's been about 10 inches of snow so far; normal would be 23.

With that in mind, Fisher and other University of Scranton staff who hail from colder, harsher winter climates answered this question: Are we winter wimps?

"I mean I could think that, because I grew up with -30 (degree weather), but that would be doing a disservice," Fisher said, noting "Northeast Pennsylvania has its own treacherous conditions as well."

Victoria Castellanos, Ph.D., dean of the university's Panuska College of Professional Studies, expressed a similar sentiment. She lives in Waverly Twp., but grew up in Stanford, Montana, a small town in the middle of the state where the Rocky Mountains start to rise out of the High Plains.

"I understand, I think, why people freak out about the roads here because, the nature of the temperature change and the precipitation, I think the roads can go from fine to terrible quickly — much more quickly than they can in Montana," she said. "But I honestly don't remember ever having school called off for the cold, ever."

When it's exceedingly cold in Stanford, "like more than 20 below zero," Castellanos said grocery shoppers often leave their vehicles running in the parking lot, hoping to avoid a situation where they won't start up again. Montana temperatures can reach 50 below or colder. When Northeast Pennsylvania records single-digit weather, Castellanos barely blinks.

"I just expect it to be cold in the winter," she said. "I don't wear gloves a lot. I don't wear hats a lot. In fact, when we were kids in Montana, it was very uncool to wear anything like hats and mittens and stuff."

Political science professor Gretchen Van Dyke, Ph.D., has called Scranton home for nearly 29 years. But Van Dyke's upbringing in the snow belt village of Orchard Park, New York — where she recalled delivering newspapers with her siblings during the brutal Buffalo blizzard of 1977 — shaped her understanding of what constitutes a lot of snow.

"Here, if we get a foot of snow I would say I begin to get worried," Van Dyke said.

Orchard Park is a suburb of Buffalo, where about 116 inches of snow have fallen so far this season. Scranton's total hasn't reached a foot.

"Scranton, in its personality and the community that we have, is a small Buffalo," Van Dyke said. "We get a lot of wet, damp winter weather (here), and I've said at times I'd rather be frozen in Buffalo than deal with the dampness in Scranton."

To some extent, Fisher said one's reaction to cold weather can be a matter of perspective. When the thermometer dips to 10 degrees here he bundles up in a parka and other warm attire, but that wasn't always the case.

"I can remember in college back in Minnesota it'd be negative 30, and then the next day it might be 10 above," Fisher said. "Well that's a 40 degree bump. You suddenly jump 40 degrees and we would all be ... wearing our shorts to class in 10 degree weather."

Contact the writer: jhorvath@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9141; @jhorvathTT on Twitter.