GREENFIELD — It seemed as though snowfall had avoided Franklin County like a plague throughout most of the winter, but the spring has been a completely different story.
A blanket of snow fell for much of Monday, leaving a layer between 3 and 5 inches thick across roadways and lawns just as the trees are supposed to be sprouting leaves.
Snow totals in Franklin County were generally around 4.5 to 5 inches, according to National Weather Service data.
Greenfield and Heath got 4.5 inches, while Leverett had 4.8. Northfield had the highest reported total of 5 inches.
Bill Simpson, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Taunton, said what was shocking about the Monday storm was not that it happened, but the temperatures that accompanied it.
“This is not unusual to have snow in April,” Simpson said Tuesday. “What is very unusual is how cold it was (Monday).”
At Orange Municipal Airport, the nearest National Weather Service base to Greenfield, temperatures stayed in the 20s Monday with wind chill getting down to single digits early Tuesday morning.
Simpson said an arctic air mass which had dropped down from Canada was the cause of the cold. He said to expect temperatures in the mid to low teens Wednesday morning.
In Montague, Public Works director Tom Bergeron said those conditions made this storm particularly expensive. He said the department opted to try melting the snow with salt instead of plowing, because the ground had already softened and doing that could easily damaged curbs and lawns.
When the snow melted, though, it created a lot of slush, which froze in the arctic chill. So, they ended up breaking out the plows anyway.
“Most of the town has been swept already, so we tried to use salt to burn off the snow,” Bergeron. “The colder-than-usual air caused it to freeze, then we had to go back out with sand.”
The majority of snow will be gone by Wednesday afternoon, Simpson predicted. The Weather Service calls for temperatures in the 50s on Thursday and Friday.
Simpson said record setting snowfall in Holyoke, where good records are kept, were in 1907 and 1982, when April snowfall totals topped one foot.
Bergeron, the Montague DPW head, said he’s not surprised to see such a late snow storm.
“It’s New England,” he said. “We live with it.”