“It’s not so much the temperature, as when the wind blows – it goes right through you.”
The comment from Linda Hikel, town clerk in Canaan, Vt., is typical of New Englanders this week, as a blast of frigid air continues to plunge the mercury across the Northeast.
 Conditions creating ‘The Perfect Cold’ (Accuweather graphic) |
The wind-chill factor is making it feel like minus 60 degrees in some locations and temps are expected to nosedive even further in the next two days.
“It’s been a little while since Arctic air came this far south in force,” Steven Maleski, a meteorologist at the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury told the Rutland Herald. “This year’s jet-stream pattern has opened the gates. It hasn’t been going over the Great Lakes, which means it’s not getting modified and we’re seeing what it’s really like.”
At Cannon Mountain, a ski resort in northern New Hampshire, a temperature of 14 below zero combined with 27 mph winds is creating the minus-60 wind chill, but it doesn’t seem to faze assistant ski-patrol director Gareth Slattery.
“Wind chill is if you’re standing out there naked, and I don’t see anyone out there naked,” he told the Associated Press. “It’s something weathermen use to scare the general public with.”
In Boston, meteorologists have been predicting temperatures that could break 100-year lows in the Massachusetts capital.
According to the Boston Globe, the last time the mercury fell so far was in 1888, during a snowstorm that dominated the following day’s newspaper with descriptions of screaming winds and ice-coated ships. The Globe says a schooner and several ferryboats were frozen solid in Boston Harbor, and in Marblehead, wind had torn shutters off houses and detached signal lanterns. Men had frozen to death in New Haven, Conn., and Fitchburg, Mass.
”At this writing, it is colder and colder, wanting but a few degrees of zero, and the wind is howling across the common at a terrific rate,” wrote one Globe reporter. But not everyone suffered from the cold. ”Ye coal-dealer and ye cocktail-maker throve handsomely,” the 19th century story said.
Jim Gordon is a former commercial fisherman who spent time in Alaska, but this week’s ice-thickening conditions at his new home in Maine are definitely having an impact.
“This is just brutal. I haven’t felt nothing like this before,” he told the Portland Press-Herald.
And apparently, the worst is not over.
“If you thought it has been cold recently, just wait!” says Accuweather.
 Arctic blast to plunge mercury even further (Accuweather graphic) |
“A bitterly cold discharge of air is setting its sights on the Great Lakes and Northeast for Thursday and Friday. A strong upper-level low will track eastward from the Midwest and will open the door for the frigid airmass. Thursday and Friday will likely be the coldest days of the entire season across these regions.”
Frostbite is a major concern when temperatures stay so low.
“Unlike other mammals, humans’ circulatory systems are quick to abandon extremities in order to preserve heat at the core,” says the Globe. “With exposure to bitter cold, the tissue in fingers, toes, or noses can become inflamed – and then die. Although alcohol can prevent frostbite by pushing blood flow into fingertips, it also brings a higher pain threshold, and a higher risk of dying.”
