A record on Mt. Washington amid ultra cold across the Granite State
Feb. 4—Before dawn on Saturday, the summit of Mount Washington registered its coldest temperature on record: 47 degrees below zero, dwarfing an earlier milestone of minus-35 set in 1963, according to the observatory atop the state's tallest peak.
Overnight Friday into early Saturday, New Hampshire and Northern New England registered the coldest temperatures recorded in the northern hemisphere at that time — colder than in Siberia, according to the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine.
Around noon Saturday, frozen pipes burst at Elliot Hospital in Manchester, drenching floors in the ICU and emergency room with up to three inches of water. Affected patients were relocated to hospital rooms, and their care was uninterrupted, according to emergency and hospital reports.
Around midnight Saturday morning, a firefighter suffered frostbite and another fell on an icy roadway while responding to a fire at multi-family house at 26 Liberty St. Manchester fire officials said careless disposal of smoking materials was responsible for the fire, which started on the building's second-floor porch and extended up to the third floor. No residents were injured, but six were displaced and connected with the local Red Cross. City records show the home is owned by Michael P. Craig, husband of Mayor Joyce Craig.
Fire hydrants froze and firefighting equipment malfunctioned as temperatures plummeted to minus-14, with a wind chill of minus-35 in the Queen City.
Pipes burst at 2 Wall St., Manchester, a commercial building that includes the offices of U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and The Mental Health Center of Greater Manchester. Firefighters arrived Saturday morning to find water flowing from the building — and the device that held the building's keys had frozen.
Eversource responded to outages caused by strong wind gusts bringing tree limbs down onto power lines, and on Saturday at 7 p.m. was working to restore power to about 300 customers.
The extreme temperatures did not produce abnormal calls to State Police, according to a department spokesperson. But troopers responded to an increased amount of vehicles disabled by the extreme cold.
Across the Granite State, winter turned to new levels of jaw-dropping, wind-howling cold.
Pittsburg reported minus-33 degrees at 7 a.m. Saturday. Pinkham Notch clocked in with a low of minus-27 and Bretton Woods registered minus-29 in the wee hours.
Friday to Saturday overnight lows ranged from minus-19 in Keene and minus-18 in North Conway and Laconia to minus-15 in Nashua and Concord, minus-14 in Lebanon, and minus-13 in Wolfeboro.
Manchester felt a wind chill of minus-39 just before 2 a.m. Goffstown registered a wind chill of minus-48 at 3:25 a.m. Concord's coldest wind chill, minus-43, was recorded at 5:50 am. Portsmouth clocked in with a wind chill of minus-40.
The prize winner was Mount Washington, with a wind chill of minus-108 at around 11 p.m. on Friday night, likely a U.S. record.
"It's unusual. We haven't seen this kind of extreme cold for a long time," Michael Cempa, a weather service forecaster for Maine and New Hampshire, said Saturday. "We exceeded some of the coldest we'd seen previously, and this came with wind."
Cempa said the Arctic front dropped down from north of Hudson Bay in Canada, and the temperatures in its wake are expected to be above normal on Sunday, with 44 degrees predicted for Nashua.
The strangest part of the system is the speed of the extreme temperature shift, Cempa said. "All winter, it's been fairly warm in Canada. The cold air moved quickly through."
This week's temperatures will be above normal for this time of year, Cempa said.
