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This week, Thursday might have felt like a Monday to quite a few folks around Dallas County and Selma. That is due to having the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on Monday and then having a couple of snow days called by our local school districts.

For the local schools, they had a two-day week, and the bad part of it was that there was no snow for local kids to enjoy.

For the second time this month, we were right along the edge of the snow. The first time, we missed it because we were too far south. This time, we missed it because we were too far north.

That’s par for the course when it comes to Southern snowstorms. However, this was one for the ages for our friends to the South. 

Mobile officially had 7.5 inches of snow depth from this snowstorm. And the crazy thing, this storm didn’t start out like many southern storms where it starts as rain and changes to snow. This time, it was all snow along the Gulf Coast. 

Our burst of Siberian air went all the way down to the coast. That’s why it felt so bad around here. Not only was it below freezing for the better part of three days this week, we also had a frigid wind chill that made it feel like we were in International Falls, Minnesota, which James Spann dubbed the “nation’s icebox.”

In fact, it was colder here than it was in Juneau, Alaska. New Orleans recorded eight inches of snow in this one event, and the National Weather Service in Juneau said that was more snow than they’d had since the beginning of December. In fact, they joked that New Orleans could send them back their snow or they could just send them a king cake to call it even.

This is the snowstorm that kids along the Gulf Coast will tell their grandkids about in the future. 

Unfortunately, our kids got left out of the fun. The Bible says it rains on the just and the unjust. If they’d had a polar outbreak like we had here, I guess the same would apply to the snow.

While we could criticize schools for canceling class this week, I think it’s better to thank them for their abundance of caution. If this storm had tracked farther north, we would have been the ones who would have gotten the big blanket of snow. And our friends in Butler County unfortunately had to deal with a major crash caused by the snowfall. If school had not been canceled and the snow hit us like it did to the south, we would have been in major trouble.

While the weather whiffed on the forecast for us specifically, we are glad our school leaders decided to err on the side of caution.

One day, our kids will get a big snowfall, but we will just have to be patient.

 

Brent Maze is the publisher of The Selma Times-Journal. He can be reached at brent.maze@selmatimesjournal.com.