October Storm Aimed at Berkshires| 11:13PM / Friday, October 28, 2011 | |
 Cancellations, postponements, announcements:
♦ St. Elisabeth of Hungary Parish, North Adams, has canceled classes for Sunday morning, Oct. 30.
♦ Drury High School Homecoming rescheduled for Sunday night from 6 to 9:30.
♦ North Adams has declared a snow emergency from 6 p.m. Saturday until 6 p.m. Sunday. On-street parking banned to allow plows to get through.
♦ Saturday night's welcome contra dance in Lenox is canceled.
♦ The Adams Lions Club, Greylock Credit Union and Adams Town Events Committee have canceled the Adams Halloween Parade and Pumpkin Patch Hunt on Sunday.
♦ The Friends of the Animals of Adams has canceled its parade & costume party for Sunday. It will not be rescheduled.
♦ Pope John Paul the Great in Adams has canceled religous education for Sunday.
♦ The Town of Clarksburg has declared a snow emergency until Monday morning.
♦ Haunted Hayride for Sunday at Windsor Lake, North Adams, canceled.
♦ Spectrum Playhouse in Lee has canceled Sunday's Les Inegales concert.
Updates Sunday, Oct. 30, morning:
John Hockridge of the New England Weather Associates recorded 18 inches in North Adams. "Compare to most snow for the MONTH of November in North Adams, 16.6" - since our records began in 1974 (37 years)," he tweeted Sunday morning.
Updates Saturday, Oct. 29, evening:
There are multiple fender benders and cars off the road being reported, including numerous cars off the road on Route 20. State police are urging people to stay off the roads. Snow is accumulating at a rate of 1-3 inches an hour with parts of South and Central Berkshires being hit the worst.
About 1,000 National Grid customers were out of power in South County; there were scattered outages of Western Mass. Electric. More than 70,000 were out of power in Central Mass.
State police had declared state roads "impassable" earlier in the evening, according to The Berkshire Eagle, because snow fell faster than highway workers had prepared for.
Some of the unofficial snow totals posted on our Facebook page are 15 inches in Washington, 14 in Hinsdale, 10 in Adams and 8-9 in Stamford, Vt., as of 7:30 p.m.
One fatality was reported in Springfield when a man touched an electrified guardrail.
The snowfall that turned the Berkshires briefly into a winter wonderland on Friday morning was a warning of things to come.
The region is bracing for a Halloween blizzard that could drop up to 15 inches in the higher elevations over the weekend. The National Weather Service has posted a winter storm warning from noon Saturday to 6 a.m. on Sunday.
School's out and there are no major events planned for Saturday, but there are a number of Halloween parades and activites planned outside for Sunday. iBerkshires will be updating with any cancellations as they come in. If you are canceling an event, email us at info@iberkshires.com or post on our Facebook page.
Our first cancellation is the Drury High School Homecoming that was scheduled for Saturday night. Depending on weather conditions, it will be held on Sunday from 6 to 9:30.
Accumulations of snow ranging from 4-8 inches in New York to a foot or more in Southern Vermont and the Berkshires is expected to begin Saturday afternoon.
The wet, heavy snow that's predicted could do serious damage to trees, some which are barely into their fall foliage colors. Western Massachusetts Electric Co. said it is preparing for downed tree limbs and lines and has placed all of its line crews on call and secured the assistance of 26 contractor tree crews.
The storm is expected to sweep into the area with icy rain before changing over to snow and continuing until late in the day. The National Weather Service is warning of widespread power outages across the Albany Capital Region and southward and "treacherous" roads by Saturday afternoon.
Temperatures will be in the 30s and upper 20s, with wind gusts up to 30 mph. Visibility is anticipated at a half-mile or less during the storm.
The last significant snowstorm in October was in 1987. It canceled the Fall Foliage Parade for the first in decades and left thousands of North Berkshire residents without power.
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