Mother Nature punctuated a run of mild fall weather Thursday with frigid temperatures and a white dusting that set a record for the earliest measurable snowfall in the Chicago area.
Schoolbound children zigzagged on city sidewalks with tongues hanging out as meteorologists measured the nearly third of an inch of snow that fell in a hurry at O’Hare.
The wintry practice run was part of a one-two punch that also nearly tied an 89-year-old record of 38 degrees for the coldest daytime maximum temperature on Oct. 12. The high Thursday was 39 degrees.
“A low-pressure system just developed and strengthened, and quite a bit of cold air from Canada came down with it,” said Tim Halbach, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “That breaks the record for the earliest snowfall ever, dating back to 1871.”
Getting brushed back with a snowball even before the World Series starts is sport in the Chicago area, which previously saw measurable snowfall on Oct. 18 in 1972 and 1989, when 0.2 and 0.7 inches fell respectively, Halbach said.
The heaviest snowfall Thursday, 1.5 inches, was recorded in Belvidere, just east of Rockford, according to meteorologists. Palatine received 1.2 inches.
In most places, any evidence that snow had fallen was gone by noon. But forecasters said the cold snap was expected to continue Friday, when there is another chance of flurries.
In a few circles that brought shouts of joy.
“I thought, this could be a good year,” said Tammy Macholl of the Marengo Snowgoers, a snowmobile club. “It was wonderful for like an hour. Then the sun came out and it’s gone.”
For others, like Gregory Pesavento of Elmhurst, the snow was enough to elicit that nagging question, “Why the heck am I living here?”
Pesavento’s morning ritual of stopping in a doughnut shop for coffee was interrupted when someone shouted that it was snowing.
The nasty weather made him think of family, especially that daughter who lives in Florida, said Pesavento, 51.
The snow-removal veterans with the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation cast a weather eye on the crucial ground temperatures, which hovered around 40 degrees.
“Unless there was an unbelievable amount of snow that came down at a rapid rate, we knew it was not going to stick,” spokesman Matt Smith said. “But it was a reminder that it’s time to swap out those Cubs and Sox windbreakers for something a little more substantial.”
With the snow were also the inevitable fender benders. Six weather-related crashes were scattered about southern McHenry County in the space of an hour, including a head-on collision that left two people hospitalized, police said.
At the Morton Arboretum in Lisle and the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, the staffs had prepared for the cold snap.
“The sudden drop in temperature like we had [early Thursday] is going to drive the plants crazy, because they need a gradual drop in temperature, not a sudden drop,” to prepare for winter, said Kunso Kim, a curator at the Morton Arboretum.
Kim and Tim Pollak, an outdoor floriculturist with the Botanic Garden, advised gardeners to bring in less hardy plants and to start laying mulch for cover if they haven’t done so already.
