Power outages, slippery roads, New Hampshire survives first winter storm of the eason
Dec. 18—A long-duration storm dropped nearly 2 feet of heavy, wet snow on some portions of New Hampshire throughout Friday and into Saturday.
The first significant storm of the season downed trees and powerlines, robbing thousands of businesses and homes of electricity. But it provided a boon to ski areas and snowmobilers, who eye the North Country for the Christmas holidays, weather permitting.
The hardest hit areas of the state were western portions of Hillsborough and Merrimack counties, eastern Cheshire County, Sullivan County and southern Carroll County, according to online power company outage maps and National Weather Service snowfall measurements.
Snow totals in a handful of towns in those regions exceeded 20 inches.
A National Weather Service spotter recorded 21 inches near Peterborough. By late Saturday morning, the storm had subsided but the town was experiencing widespread power outages, said Brad Winters, the deputy fire chief in Peterborough.
He said the heavy snow weighed down trees, which fell onto power lines.
Early Friday evening, a tractor-trailer jackknifed on Route 101 on Temple Mountain.
Still, Peterborough has seen such storms before.
"They're doing well," Winters said of townspeople.
As of 7 a.m. Saturday, more than 50,000 electricity customers were without power, state emergency management officials reported. Online maps for Eversource show power failures in a swath west of Milford and east of Keene, from the Massachusetts border up to New London.
As of 10 a.m., nearly 9% of Eversource customers were without power.
More than 15% of New Hampshire Electric Coop customers were without power at 10 a.m. That included all 689 customers in the town of Canaan and all but one of the Coop's 524 customers in Stewartstown.
The wet snow clung to roads, making accidents inevitable.
In Hollis on Friday, a police officer checking on a vehicle that had slid off the road was struck by another cruiser that was responding to the same crash. He was not seriously injured, officials said.
Nick King, program manager at the state's Transportation Management Center, described the storm as long duration.
Cannon Mountain had 21 of 97 trails open. Its website reported 7 to 10 inches of new snow.
Mount Sunapee, which was closer to the snowbelt, reported more than 14 inches on Saturday morning and estimated another 1 to 3 inches during the day.
But only about 25% of its 67 trails were open.
Selected New Hampshire snowfall totals
from National Weather Service Albany 25
Claremont 21
Peterborough 21
New London 18
New Durham 14
Hanover 10
Deerfield 9
Laconia 8
Bedford 5
Rochester 5
Manchester airport 4 Concord airport 3
