First Person: Digging Out from Nemo in Western Massachusetts

Yahoo! News is gathering brief first-person accounts, photos and video from the severe winter weather in the northeastern United States. Here's one resident's story.

FIRST PERSON | WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS -- The snow started Friday afternoon, the nice kind of snow that's fun to play in. My family and I took a walk through our neighborhood with our 2-year old, who had a blast running along the lightly dusted sidewalks.

Saturday morning, that walk is a cardio workout. The local news says Springfield got 15 inches of snow overnight. But the snow is almost up to my knees on our side street, making the total more like 20 to 22 inches. We live right off a major street, which saw regular plowing all night. While that's good, it also means there's a four foot pile of snow blocking our street in.

We consider ourselves lucky. We still have power, and if we had to get out, we could probably force our way through the snow eventually. It could have been much worse. I grew up just outside Boston, and was six years old during the Blizzard of '78. We lived a few hundred yards from the ocean, and got flooded on top of the snow. Here in western Massachusetts, we don't have anything like that to contend with. Even compared to the Halloween ice storm in 2011, Nemo isn't as bad. The trees aren't snapping in half and threatening to fall on us this time.

So we got lucky. The folks I'm worried about are out east. My elderly mother still lives in our family home. Hopefully, the storm surge will spare her part of the beach this time.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/first-person-digging-nemo-western-massachusetts-201800667.html

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