Butler County weathers harvest snowfall
Many Butler County residents awoke to a fresh powdering of snow Wednesday morning.
Slippery Rock Area School District, Slippery Rock University and Portersville Christian School announced a two-hour delay for their operations, so that anyone driving to those campuses would have more time to negotiate road conditions.
Gardeners in the race against time that is the fall harvest gathered all they could, working to prevent as much damage to crops that can freeze and die.
And the National Weather Service had a few words of warning to drivers, homeowners and gardeners.
“If you have exposed steps or walkways, make sure you use railings,” said meteorologist Lee Hendricks. “For instance, if you have metal steps and you have a frost, that’s going to make those a little bit slippery, so you definitely want to be able to hold on.”
Hendricks added that 2 inches of snow had fallen overnight, mostly throughout areas north of Butler itself.
“With temperatures dropping down as much as they are, if there’s any wet spots, you might get a slick spot here and there on bridges and overpasses,” he said. “For motorists, just be cautious going up bridges and overpasses. Especially on bridges, because the bridge is exposed on all sides to the air.”
A slick spot on a bridge could interfere with ability to gain traction, so it’s safer for drivers allow for extra room between the vehicle and the one in front of them.
He anticipated rain and showers this afternoon, in addition to temperatures that drop into the upper 20s.
“You may end up having a hard freeze in some areas,” he said.
A hard freeze occurs when temperatures reaching 26 degrees Fahrenheit or lower kill pollen-producing plants such as flowers, squashes and melons.
“We started harvesting soybeans on Monday,” said Zach Speer, a farmer at Har-Lo Farms Inc. who also grows corn, wheat and oats. “Soybeans are basically dying off, so they’re at the right moisture for a combine. It’s the end of their growing season, so then they die off, and we start harvesting.”
A combine harvester is a machine that reaps, threshes, gathers and winnows a variety of crops, making farming more efficient.
Warnings about the snowfall from the weather service drove Speer’s team to hasten their work even more than usual. Soybeans can tolerate rain and snow to an extent, but exposure from the snowfall will damage some of them, said Speer.
“It’s definitely been a dramatic fall there for the last 48 hours, but at least now temperatures going back up,” Speer said.
He added that the wheat, oats and corn he also grew were holding up fine throughout the low temperatures.
“Everyone has the old joke, at least the locals that have grown up in Western Pennsylvania,” said Hendricks. “If you don’t like the weather, stick around for a couple of hours.”
The cold air flowing in from off the Great Lakes can help cause lots of surprises at this time of year, but more often than not, these cold spells are short-lived, said Hendricks.
