Ice Storm Warning for Berkshire County

The rare Ice Storm Warning has been issued for Berkshire County starting at 5 PM this evening and ending at 7 AM Tuesday. Despite the uncertainty we detailed in the previous post, this is not a storm to take lightly.

Main roads will be iffy tomorrow and side roads could be flat out dangerous. You will really need to monitor local conditions carefully if you must head out on Monday, especially in the morning. It's almost assured that any practices and games tomorrow and tomorrow night will have to be postponed. If school were in session, we would have a full county sweep for cancellations, most of which would have been called in the night before.

NWS Albany. That's a lot of ice for mid-county.

The other thing to watch for is power outages. The wind is supposed to kick up, which will help shake off ice on tree limbs, but it also could hasten the breaking of those limbs. We rarely advocate racing out to the grocery store and stocking up, but if you normally do your weekly food shopping on Mondays, you might want to take care of that chore today.

When the ice will start to form is not totally clear, but it will likely start after midnight. We could see a few inches of snow first in Dalton and points northward before the changeover to sleet and then freezing rain. Whether you get snow, sleet or freezing rain will be very hard to pinpoint. An extended period of freezing rain will do the most damage while extended sleet will make travel nearly impossible.

We'll do one more update later this evening.