From Mild Weather—

Snow Business Hampered, But Consumers Benefit

By John Voket

Although it was early January, Barbara Tilson looked a bit out of place Wednesday as she and her son Christopher shopped for a snow shovel, ice scraper, and rock salt at Newtown Hardware.

“I just want to be prepared,” she told the clerk at the checkout stand. “It’s going to snow sometime, isn’t it?”

That is a question being asked across the region this winter as municipalities sit on stockpiles of sand and salt, and businesses that normally go dark, such as landscapers and masons, continue to work uninterrupted into this first week of the New Year.

Meteorologists say the warm spell is due to a combination of factors: El Niño, a cyclical warming trend now under way in the Pacific Ocean, can lead to milder weather, particularly in the Northeast; and the jet stream, the high-altitude air current that works like a barricade to hold back cold Canadian air, is running much farther north than usual over the East Coast.

The weather is prone to short-term fluctuations, and forecasters said the mild winter does not necessarily mean global warming is upon us. In fact, the Plains have been hit by back-to-back blizzards in the past two weeks and crews in Colorado are still battling seven-foot drifts from the storms.

By this time last year, Newtown Highway Department crews had already distributed more than 2,500 yards of sand and more than 520 tons of salt and were ordering more. But according to Public Works Director Frederick Hurley, this year’s supply has gone virtually untouched, and winter overtime for plowing crews has yet to be tapped.

“We’re actually continuing on with our road work,” Mr Hurley told The Bee Tuesday. “We’ll keep going with that as long as we can. It puts us in a good situation, schedulewise.”

Currently the town is in the middle of a long-term road improvement and repair program that is usually halted by this time of year, Mr Hurley explained. But if crews can continue to dig in unfrozen ground and apply asphalt and other materials, it allows the program to continue uninterrupted.

“Otherwise we would just pick it up in the springtime,” Mr Hurley said.

The mild weather creates a good-news-bad-news scenario for Mike Sorrentino at Newtown Hardware. While he continues to sell material and equipment to contractors and homeowners catching up on exterior work, painting and roofing, his basement is packed with tends of thousands of dollars in ice melting compounds, rock salt, sand, shovels, even snow sleds.

“I can’t imagine we’ll be selling out of all this before spring,” Mr Sorrentino said.

Landscaping companies that may normally fall back on plowing and winter maintenance by this time are still fully engaged in outdoor projects. Barbara Butler, who runs Valley View Landscaping with husband, has not had any plowing work to date, but her crews are still fully engaged in other fair weather projects.

“We’re working! We’re planting, believe it or not,” Ms Butler said. “We planted the week before Christmas. We did some work for a client with a small commercial property down in Trumbull, putting in some evergreen shrubs, mulching.”

Todd Gay of Landscaping Unlimited normally gives his crews January and February off, but he is taking advantage of the mild weather to put finishing touches on a new commercial headquarters in Monroe.

“We gave up plowing a few years ago because of winters like this,” he said. “But as far as landscaping goes, we normally feel pretty good if we can stretch jobs into the week of Christmas.”

Mr Gay said if customers were calling for landscape work, he would be doing it.

The phone has not stopped ringing at Holmes Fine Gardens Center in Hawleyville, which is good news for owner Dan Holmes.

“We’ve got four crews going out every day,” Mr Holmes said. “Typically, all we’re doing at this time of the year is design work, maintenance on our own equipment, and a few select plowing jobs. But we’re still tremendously busy doing planting and masonry jobs.”

At the Newtown Health District, Director Donna Culbert said the lack of freezing weather is creating an unusually long period of activity for ticks.

“We’ve already had our first tick of the year brought in for testing,” Ms Culbert said Wednesday. “If you are out walking in the woods or working out in the yard, you still have to look for them before heading back in.”

The Health District sanitarians have also been unusually busy because maintenance and installations of septic systems and wells are continuing unabated by freezing weather.

“Our water table is still pretty high, so septic systems are being taxed,” she added. “So even though it’s the middle of winter, people need to watch their water use as though it was the middle of a dry summer.”

The double bonus for Northeastern consumers and homeowners is the mild weather’s impact on heating fuel use. While furnaces are being used more sparingly, the overall result in lower consumption is effecting oil and gas prices globally.

Home-heating demand in the Northeast, the region responsible for 80 percent of US heating-oil use, was 43 percent below normal through last Wednesday, forecaster Weather Derivatives said. Domestic fuel stockpiles probably rose last week, according to the median of responses in a Bloomberg News survey. The decline was the biggest since April 27, 2005.

And natural gas prices have tumbled 30 percent in the past four weeks. Benchmark futures are down 42 percent from a year ago.